The paper analyses the changes in the scale of the rural economic activity and identifies their selected determinants. The socio-demographic characteristics of the labour resources and the economic differences between rural regions in Poland were analysed as reasons for the dissimilar levels of rural employment. Analyses have demonstrated that, in 2010–2016, rural economic activity measured by the employment rate increased from 50% to 53%, primarily as a result of the impact of cyclical determinants, reflected in the increase in the number of the employed being higher than the number of inactive persons, with a reduced scale of unemployment overall. The studies indicated similar values of the employment rate for urban and rural areas, while the differences in its level within the selected social categories were much more visible for rural populations. This reflected a persistence of territorial disparities in labour markets as well as a trend towards their convergence. The level of territorial differences in the rural employment in Poland was moderate and should be linked with regional economic characteristics. In this context, the allocation of rural labour supply could be attributed to the impact of cities and their functional areas and to the progress in economic diversification of villages located in a particular region. The discussion section of the paper outlines the institutional opportunities and barriers increasing rural economic activity. The presented conclusions were based on the Central Statistical Office data (mainly the Labour Force Survey and the Local Data Bank) and statistical and comparative analysis methods.
Empirical literature in the field of regional resilience has most commonly concentrated on a unique economic shock. However, the existing studies have fallen short of comparing the resilience patterns across different crises. The purpose of this study is to investigate the geographical persistence of regional resilience across different recessionary shocks, namely: 1) the 2008–2010 Global Financial Crisis; 2) the 2011–2013 Sovereign Debt Crisis; 3) the 2019–2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The study covers 202 European Nuts II regions. It applied a range of empirical tools such as Markovian Transition Probability Matrices, Global Moran’s and Local Moran’s, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, Kendal’s tau, and Spearman’s correlation coefficient, as well as illustrative maps. As an outcome, several important conclusions are reached. First, the spatial pattern of resilience is not stable/persistent over time, as the three recessions tend to hit different places at different crisis times. Second, in general, Southern European regions are the most consistently fragile/vulnerable regions. Third, spatial patterns of resilience are weakly correlated across the different recessions. From the policy standpoint, it is understood that dealing with employment resilience is more difficult than previously thought by the policymakers. Since the resilience pattern is not stable spatially, each crisis should be evaluated separately and no generic policy rules can be formulated to foster the resilience. Thus, one can understand that although the sources of the crises are different, there may be some geographies that are structurally suffering the recessions which necessitate a consideration of the reasons and the formulation of the related policies.