INCOME DISPERSION IN POLAND. AN ANALYSIS IN YEARS 2005 – 2018 BASED ON INDIVIDUAL INCOMES OF POLISH GMINA’S (COMMUNES) IN NUTS 2 and NUTS 3 units

Abstract

Presented paper addresses the issue of income inequalities among regions in Poland. Although the topic is broadly discussed both in scientific literature and public debates, the problem of territorial cohesion still remains important for many scholars and politicians. In the article the main attention is focused on the measuring the wealth and its dispersion which is coherent with the current public data state and enables following the phenomena in all statistical units of NUTS nomenclature and local administrative units (local self-government entities: poviats and gminas). In the calculations presented in the paper gminas’ own resources are taken into consideration as a measure of welfare, then Theil index is employed to identify the dispersion for aggregated date on NUTS 1,2,3 units for post-accession to European Union structures period. Authors used the data delivered by the Central Statistical Office. Referring to the goals of the article, conducting of the research enabled to draw two following conclusions. Measures of wealth used in the convergence analysis are derived from national/regional accounts statistics. They are mainly depended on the place of creating value (like GDP). On the local/regional level it is recommended to analyze the situation of residents. So, other measures like gminas’ (basic local administration unit) own resources, based on personal and commercial income tax should be at least parallelly taken into consideration. An analysis of the convergence process inside the country, carried out for Polish NUTS 1, 2 and 3 administrative units in years 2005-2018, based on gminas’ own resources as a standard of living measure, showed different (opposite) patterns than the results of studies using national/regional accounts measures. Starting from the year 2006 the convergence process (sigma type) is observed in all levels of statistical regions in Poland.