Nierówności społeczno-ekonomiczne na poziomie województw – analiza zasięgu ubóstwa ekonomicznego i dysproporcji rozwojowych
Socio-economic inequalities in Poland at the voivodship level: analysis of the scope of economic poverty and disproportions in development

Summary/Abstract: The analysis of the scale of poverty and differences in the socio-economic development of regions is crucial to shaping effective public policy of a country. The aim of this study is to identify the scale and scope of economic poverty in Poland and to assess disparities in the socio-economic development of voivodships. Socio-economic development was evaluated using the Local Human Development Index (LHDI) proposed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Project Office in Poland in 2012. The selected diagnostic variables refer to three dimensions of life: health, education and wealth. The analysis was conducted on the basis of data for 2016–2022 from the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland and from web pages of district examination boards.The applied method allowed the assessment of changes in Poland’s socio-economic situation and the identification of voivodships with the relatively highest and lowest levels of development. On the one hand, the obtained results confirmed that disparities between voivodships persist, but on the other, they showed a convergence trend between the voivodships’ development levels. Using the legal poverty rate published by Statistics Poland, we identified voivodships with the relatively highest and lowest poverty rates. We also correlated the LHDI with poverty rate, thanks to which the assumption that a higher level of socio-economic development in a region corresponds to a reduction in the poverty rate was positively verified. However, the fact that this dependence is moderately strong indicates that socio-economic development is not the primary determinant of the decline in poverty rates across voivodships.

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