This paper presents the procedure and results of a classification of Poland's 16 provinces according to their level of competitiveness described by the indexes published by GUS (Poland's Chief Statistical Office).

The potential set of the properties underwent two‑step verification in terms of their diagnostic properties. The first one was performed based on an analysis of variability, whereas the latter involved studying a matrix of correlations. The final set of variables, comprises of seven substantive groups, reflecting such aspects of the regions' competitiveness as economic potential, progressiveness of the economic structure, the level of sophistication of technical infrastructure and transport accessibility, competitiveness of labour resources, social development level, extent of progress in free-market transformation as well as the general state and level of the protection of the natural environment.

The classification of Polish provinces was carried out by Hellwig's standard method as well as six selected taxonomical methods of cluster analysis: the single linkage method, complete linkage method, un-weighted pair-group method using arithmetic averages, Ward's method, k-means method and the Wrocław taxonomy method. The results were compared to those obtained using the neural network approach. The differences of the results were observed, discussed and 3-stage method was applied to further understand their origin. However we found the distinguished clusters of provinces which form the separate class for most of the methods used. Exclusion of the distinguished cluster changed the results for remaining provinces - the results became more uniform across methods used.

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