Quality of life and the labour market in Poland

Abstract

Work is an essential activity in human’s life, i.a. due to the amount of time devoted to it, but also because it is a means of meeting both economic and social needs. Having a job or losing it (or lack of employment) is one of the determinants of the level of human welfare, and in recent years dynamic changes on both the supply and demand side have forced multi-faceted research, e.g. related to the quality of employment, cultural diversity or the impact of local factors on the labour market. The aim of the article is to assess and compare regional (NUTS2) labour markets in Poland in terms of quality of life with the possible spatial effects of this process/relationship. To achieve the research objective, a set of synthetic indicators describing the quality of life in Polish regions was constructed for the needs of the study. The analysis considered processes in the labour market in years 2012–2017 and the tendencies were described with the dynamic Shift-Share Method with spatial modification (SSSA). Within this framework, it was possible to include spatial interactions of regional labour markets between “neighboring” geographic objects (according to the accepted matrix of spatial weights W). The approach allowed for an in-depth analysis of labour market conditions in terms of quality of life, as well as verification of hypotheses regarding the regional determinants and spatial differentiation of labour demand and supply, as well as the significant impact of quality of life on labour assets in voivodships.