Structural Adjustment and Regional Long Term Unemployment in Poland

JEL Classification P51, J64

Hartmut Lehmann, John O'Flaherty and Patrick P. Walsh

Department of Economics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Abstract

This paper analyses regional unemployment in Poland to explore whether unemployment outcomes reflect regional employment compositions and employment restructuring. It shows that the dynamics of regional labour demand in Poland have pushed unemployment inflows in a systematic way by changing the magnitude and composition of the flows which in turn change the regional composition of the under one year and over one year unemployment stocks and the probabilities of exit conditional on duration, gender, age, education and previous employment tenure.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Marek Gora, Klara Flori, Jonathan Wadsworth and participants at the PHARE-ACE workshop entitled "Extent and Causes of Regional Labour Market Diversification in Hungary and Poland" for valuable comments. Financial support from the European Commission (Phare-Ace project No. 94-0578-R) is also gratefully acknowledged. The ususal caveat applies.