OWN REVENUE POTENTIAL OF SMALL TOWNS IN POLAND
OWN REVENUE POTENTIAL OF SMALL TOWNS IN POLAND

Summary/Abstract: Purpose – Assessing the level of and differences in own revenue potential of small citieshaving the status of urban municipalities. The study intended to answer the followingresearch question: do the cities having the status of urban municipalities lag far behindgreater towns in terms of own revenue potential, and has the gap between them grownover the years? – Is there a wide diversity in the level of own revenue potential of smalltowns depending on their level of development and functions? – What are the most im-portant internal determinants affecting the level of own revenue potential of small townswith urban municipality status?Research method – The empirical research was conducted based on secondary datafrom the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland, processed using basic descriptive statis-tics and taxonomic methods. The focus of the study was on small towns (with less than20 thousand inhabitants) with urban municipality status (116 entities in 2020). The timespan of the study was 2007–2020.Results – The potential for own revenue of cities having the status of urban munici-palities varies strongly between them, but is on average only slightly smaller than that ofother urban municipalities. Also, the fact that it is growing should be viewed as a positivedevelopment. While its level is impacted by internal conditions, external ones were thereason why in 2020 it stopped growing as fast as in the previous years.Originality   / value   / implications   / recommendations – Monitoring the level of small cities’own revenue potential due to their importance (77% of all cities, “rural growth poles”, “local development centres”) is aimed, among other things, at identifying financially­ disadvantaged units that may require state intervention in accordance with the imple-mentation of the subsidiarity principle.

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