Bartłomiej Rokicki

Rola sieci transportowej w rozwoju polskich regionów: zastosowanie modelu potencjału ekonomicznego

This article aims at verifying the role of interregional transport infrastructure in the development of Polish regions. We use the modified model of economic potential to identify the regions with the highest values of economic potential where metropolitan areas can be developed. Subsequently, we study how regional economic potential is affected by the construction of a modern interregional transport network. It appears that although development of such a transport network is highly desirable from the perspective of the whole country, at the same time it strengthens agglomeration forces. This may result in increasing already existing disparities in economic development between Mazowieckie voivodship and other regions and prevent the emergence of metropolitan areas in Poland other than Warsaw.

Individual wages and regional market potential

In this article, we study wage determinants in Poland by employing the augmented NEG wage equation that controls for individual worker characteristics. Our analysis is based on the Labor Force Survey (LFS) conducted by the Polish Central Statistical Office (CSO) for the period 1999–2009. Using annual data on about 10,000 Polish workers in 16 regions, we find that a significant fraction of inter‐individual wage differences can be explained by the geography of access to markets.

Regional Price Indices and Real Wage Equalization in Poland

The goal of this chapter is an empirical verification of the hypothesis concerning the real wage equalization among different regions in the case of transition countries. In particular, we focus on Polish NUTS2 regions and for the first time, we apply regional PPP deflators in order to prove whether they may influence the results of the convergence analysis. The issues concerning the evolution of regional labor market disparities within Central and Eastern European countries have been thoroughly discussed in many papers. Still, most of them have focused on the persisting differences in the regional unemployment rates. At the same time, the dispersion of wages across different locations and its evolution over time has been considered as one of the possible factors influencing spatial unemployment rate differentials. Less attention was though paid to the analysis of regional wage equalization process per se. Up to now, the existing studies were based on wage data expressed either in current prices or constant ones but with price deflators calculated at the level of state. Here, we find that the application of regional PPP deflators significantly decreases the overall level of wage disparities across Polish regions (as compared to nominal wages). Nevertheless, it does not significantly change the overall pattern of their evolution. Hence, there is a tendency toward regional real wage divergence rather than equalization.

Regional structure of wages in Poland over the period 1995-2009

In this paper, we test empirically for the increasing returns-based agglomeration and investigate the impact of the economic integration with the European Union on regional wage inequalities in Poland. In our study, we use the wage data for 16 Polish regions over the period of 1995-2009. Our results are consistent with the predictions of the core-periphery models of the New Economic Geography. In particular, we find that wages decrease as one moves away from the Mazowiecki capital region, as well as from the border with Germany.