Challenges for long-term industry restructuring in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin: What has Polish coal mining achieved and failed from a twenty-year perspective?

Abstract

Restructuring entire industries within changing economic systems remains a great challenge. This restructuring is a project of extraordinary scale, including entire regions and even a whole economy. Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to assess the restructuring of coal mining in Poland from 1990 to 2013 in combination with identification of directions for its further development to guarantee survival of the industry in current market conditions. To achieve the objective, the empirical part of the paper presents the causes, process and effects of restructuring from two perspectives. The first is a macroperspective which concerns coal mining in Poland as a sector. The second is a microperspective in which the largest Polish coal producers, together with their 24 colliery structures, are analyzed. Additionally, in the theoretical part of the paper—including the introduction with the literature study—the review of previous research on restructuring is presented in order to establish the background of the analysis and evaluation that were conducted.It can be concluded from the research results that in more than twenty years of industry restructuring in Poland, only a portion of the restructuring aims have been achieved. Importantly, these aims include reductions in employment and increases in productivity but only partial and periodic increases in efficiency. However, many of the collieries have not accomplished a sustainable improvement in efficiency.