IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aoq/ekonom/y2025i1p27-51.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Between Convergence and Divergence. The Spatial Dimension of Economic Development in Communist Poland (1950–1989)

Author

Listed:
  • Piotr Koryś
  • Maciej Tymiński
  • Maciej Bukowski

Abstract

An important goal of communist economic policy was common and mass industrialization oriented on minimizing developmental inequalities between regions. Thus, the goal of this paper is to examine whether the modernization efforts of the Communist Party reduced (as planned) or rather exacerbated the economic inequality between regions. The authors use the existing data on regional income and employment structure to reconstruct the spatial structure at the voivodeship level. They use the 1976–1997 administrative division (49 small voivodships) and project backward estimates of regional income using data on employment structure and population. The results confirm regional convergence between 1950 and 1986. It was correlated with rapid growth in investment spending. The decreasing regional economic disparity between 1976 and 1986 was also related to the 1975 administrative reform. But, as the authors point out, the results confirmed, that in comparison with Western European countries the dynamics of convergence, and thus the scale of inequality reduction in Poland was only comparable to developed capitalist countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Piotr Koryś & Maciej Tymiński & Maciej Bukowski, 2025. "Between Convergence and Divergence. The Spatial Dimension of Economic Development in Communist Poland (1950–1989)," Ekonomista, Polskie Towarzystwo Ekonomiczne, issue 1, pages 27-51.
  • Handle: RePEc:aoq:ekonom:y:2025:i:1:p:27-51
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ekonomista.pte.pl/pdf-200807-123569
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    regional development; communist Poland;

    JEL classification:

    • N14 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: 1913-
    • N94 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: 1913-

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aoq:ekonom:y:2025:i:1:p:27-51. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tomasz Kwarcinski (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/pteeeea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.