Warmia-Mazury region, one of the poorest in Poland, faces the deepest (as compared to all regions of the EU) labour market crisis. The mixture of social and economic problems represents a huge challenge for regional authorities. The chances for fast improvement are limited by several factors, such as low quality of transport infrastructure, low innovation potential and productivity, large share of unskilled labour force, etc. One necessary condition of the improvement is the reform of public finances at country level. Nonetheless, regional authorities should undertake the activity in order to increase the potential of human capital in the region, e.g. by improving the quality of schools. While directly fighting unemployment more effort should be put on stimulating the demand side of the labour market and co-operation with NGOs.
The article discusses the idea of co-production, understood as informed and intentional participation of citizens in the organisation and provision of public services in the context of the global ageing process, a phenomenon which necessitates actions aimed to secure the needs of older people. The basis for the empirical investigation was a study carried out under the aegis of a WHO agency, the Centre for Health Development in Kobe, Japan. It offers an analysis of the case studies of initiatives addressed to elderly people in the local communities of 10 selected developing countries (Chile, China, Iran, Libya, Russia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Ukraine, Vietnam). The key criterion in the selection of the analysed projects was direct involvement of institutional and non-institutional representatives of local communities in their implementation. As a participant (researcher) of this international survey, the author analyses the observable manifestations of silver co-production characterising the individual initiatives.
Human capital stock affects the economic growth by raising the productivity of labour or by improving the ability of the economy to create and absorb innovations. In the scale of the local economy of an academic city, this process can be reinforced by attracting students and researchers to study and work at the local universities. To do this successfully, the city needs not only a high quality academic institutions but also the wider labour market for the educated individuals and – more generally – the ability to attract the creative class to settle down. The article provides the comparative analysis of the ability of the largest Polish cities to attract and absorb human capital. The research is based on the unique dataset coming from nasza-klasa.pl website (allowing users to contact their former class mates). The research concludes with the typology of the Polish cities with respect to the scale of benefits from performing the academic function.
The present article aims to determine which factors contributed most to a differentiation of productivity levels of Polish voivodeships in the years 1998-2008. The author applied a non-parametric DEA method (Data Envelopment Analysis) and the Malmquist productivity index. The use of the latter allowed the author to distinguish three components of changes in productivity: changes in relative efficiency, technological progress and accumulation of real capital. As a result, sources of changes of productivity in the studied time period were found and recommendations for regional policies were formulated.
The author investigates the problem of convergence of Polish regions towards their stationary stable states in the Solow model. The article shows how it is possible to estimate the conditional and unconditional ?-convergence with the panel methods. The estimations using panels with fixed effects are performed, which allows to estimate the growth rates of labor productivity (technical progress) and to check the differences between regions with respect to the productivity.
The paper examines whether EU funds may encourage local and regional development in the Lubelskie voivodship. The authors compare the actual structure of support in 2007?2013 with the necessary conditions of a positive and sustainable result of financial assistance found in the literature. In addition, six case studies were carried out to explore the mechanisms of support at the local level. The analysis shows the dominance of infrastructure spending and support for rural areas. Low expenditure on economic and knowledge capital is accompanied by virtually no support for social capital and administration quality improvement. Funds at the local level are often used purely as social aid. The observed ways of spending the funds may lead to petrifaction of an unfavourable regional economic structure, and do not ensure growth of production factors productivity
Information Society technologies are aimed at raising productivity while reducing time and costs of materials and energy for the economy. Specialists have also observed that ICTs, which have become significantly cheaper, are in huge demand for individual (household) use. Individual applications of ICT in Poland’s economy lead to a growth in different human activities. They impact the economies of Poland in a similar way to the well-known take-back (rebound) effect, which increases the efficiency of resource use and electrical energy consumption in households.
