Regional disparities in labour productivity in Poland: a spatial statistics approach

Abstract

An economic growth is considered in the agricultural economics as a central issue, most generally understood as long-term process of increasing agricultural production. Especially in neoclassical theory, the economic growth is determined mainly by a labour productivity. Hence, level and rate of change of the labour productivity are significant, particularly in the context of state activities for rural development. Our research objective was to examine spatial diversity of the labour productivity in Poland. The following partial objectives were also defined: measurement of strength and direction of inter-territorial dependencies and identification of clusters with high (or low) labour productivity level. Moreover, we assessed the labour productivity in the context of regional subsidies. Defining the labour productivity as gross value added divided by number of agricultural workers, we used Moran's I and Geary's C for identifying the spatial association. The calculations were made for 66 subregions at NUTS3 level, on the basis of information from the Local Data Bank base created by the Central Statistical Office of Poland. As the preliminary results indicated, the level of labour productivity differed by region. This included cluster with relatively low labour productivity in the Southeast and cluster with relatively high labour productivity in the North. Our findings may support decision-makers in evaluation of the instruments implemented by EU and national institutions for rural development and contribute to better understanding of agricultural policy effects. Keywords: agricultural economics, labour productivity, gross value added, spatial autocorrelation