How administrative degradation affects middle-sized cities: lessons from Poland's 1998 regional reform

ABSTRACT

Among Polish cities facing socioeconomic difficulties are the former regional capitals which lost their administrative status due to the 1998 reform, reducing the number of regions. Making use of this quasi-experimental setting, we assess the impact of the loss of administrative status on the affected cities with difference-in-differences estimations. Our findings show the negative impact of the regional amalgamation on economic and, to a lesser extent, on other dimensions of local development. We identify the reform’s contribution to the growing disparity between the second-tier and the largest cities and reflect on the design of place-based compensatory measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Socioeconomic development
• territorial inequality
• amalgamation
• regional capital status

JEL:

• R11
• R15
• R58

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the journal editors and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks. Useful comments were also collected at the Economic Geography Conference (Dublin, 2022), during presentations at the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies (Rotterdam, 2023) and Centre for European Regional and Local Studies (Warsaw, 2023) and at the Regional Studies Association Annual Conference (Ljubljana, 2023). All errors are our own. This paper is based on Cieślak, B., Nagler, P., and van Oort, F. (2023). Regional Capital No More. How the Reform of the Territorial Government has Marginalized Polish Middle-sized Cities. Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper, TI 2023-001/VIII.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The terms voivodeships and regions are used interchangeably in this study.

2. Lubuskie Voivodeship and Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, formed by 1998's reform, have double capitals.

3. The new regional capitals also received such status and related county-level institutions.

4. The number of observations is 490 for the five year period and 735 for the 10 year period.

5. One of the key reasons behind these difficulties is that dwellers rarely register their change of residence when moving within the country.