Summary:

Socio-economic development is the widest term encompassing a general development tendency of a country, region or territorial unit. The paper undertakes to calculate the level of development of rural and urban-rural communes in the Malopolska province using a method of so called zero unitarization. Ten diagnostic features, homogenous for all communes characterizing economy and local communities were selected.
As has been demonstrated by the computations results, disproportions in the development of socio-economic development in the Malopolska province are considerable, particularly concerning the economic development. It has been cor-roborated by the well known opinion about poorly developed eastern part of the province and economically stronger western part. Social development is more ter-ritorially diversified, however the scale of the diversification is much lower. In conclusion the Author referred to research conducted by other authors, testifying the processes of spatial polarization, i.e. growing development differences between the rich or getting rich areas and poor ones. Rich areas develop owing to utilization of their potential and good market condition, whereas poverty areas (also called problem areas) for various reasons remain economically stagnant.