CHANGES IN SPATIAL DIVERSITY OF THE LEVEL OF LIVING OF POLAND’S POPULATION IN 2003-2012

Abstract

Objective

The level of living of  individual countries and their regions is largely conditional on the level of socio-economic development represented by the country concerned. For the majority of developed and developing countries the general standard of living has been improving. At the same time, the distance between the countries and regions with the lowest and highest level of economic development has been growing. In Poland, the level of living varies across different regions (voivodships) due to, for example, cultural, historical, social and economic reasons. Like the other EU Member States, Poland has been taking measures aimed at eliminating the disparities in the level of living amongst the country’s population, and has been striving for its improvement. Those measures are taken, inter alia, within the framework of the EU cohesion policy.

            The focus of the study, whose results are presented in this paper, was to verify the hypothesis on the improvement of the level of living and the decline of disparities in this respect across different voivodships at the time before and after Poland’s accession to the European Union. Moreover, the study was also concerned with the assessment of interrelations existing between the location of a given voivodship and its level of living.

Research method

            In the study, statistical and econometric methods were applied. In order to compare the level of living in the voivodships across Poland in the years 2003-2012, a modified version of Hellwig’s measure of development was utilised. To determine the nature and degree of spatial dependencies  of the level of living across the country, global Moran’s spatial autocorrelation statistic was employed. Next, based on the original set of diagnostic features, an analysis of similarity was conducted and homogenous groups of voivodships were determined. For this, Ward’s method was used based on a variance analysis to estimate the distances between individual clusters. Data of the Central Statistical Office in Warsaw, covering the year 2003 and 2012,  provided the basis for the analyses.

Conclusions

The studies presented in the paper suggest that in the period under discussion there was an improvement  in the standard of living of the population across all voivodships, and simultaneously their polarization occurred in terms of the category investigated. What also emerged was a new growth pole – Dolnośląskie (Lower Silesian) voivodship. The rejection of the hypothesis on the declining disparities amongst Poland’s population across individual voivodships implies that the measures our country have been implementing have not met their objectives entirely,  thus providing the need for discussing their relevance and efficiency.

Originality/ value of the paper, contribution to science development

The paper employs the tools of spatial econometrics which enhance the analysis of the spatial diversity of people’s  level of living, and facilitate the drawing of correct and important conclusions as regards the issue under discussion.