The Impact of Administrative Reform on Labour Market Transformations in Large Polish Cities

Abstract

The purpose of the article was to discuss the impact of administrative reforms on the dynamics and the direction of changes occurring in the labour market structure of cities. In the existing research the view prevails that the loss of the voivodship capital function contributes strongly to the socio-economic degradation of the city. In Poland, this discussion has been caused by an administrative reform, as a result of which 49 existing voivodships and the related 49 voivodship capitals were replaced by 16 voivodships and 18 regional capitals. The carried out research focused on both these Polish urban centres which lost their voivodship status and the ones which retained it and become the centres of new, large regions. The Bray-Curtis measure was used to analyse the studied transformations. The data for 2005 and 2016 were used in the research. The conducted study allowed the identification of groups of the cities characterised by a similar range of changes in labour market structure. The research focused on answering the question whether retaining or losing the status of a voivodship city is related to the scale of these changes. The research results presented in the article seem to confirm that the role of administrative changes in the development of cities is not as extensive as it has commonly been attributed. The actual reasons for the economic growth of large centres, or the shrinking of some former voivodship cities, cannot be reduced to the effects of the reform itself. They result, to a much greater extent, from the processes of deindustrialisation, predominantly related to the regression of the declining industry sectors.