Impact of economic crises on long-term regional development in Poland 1

. The existing research indicates large differences in the degree of socio-economic development at the local and regional level in Poland. The study presented in this paper identifies the trends characterising the long-term economic development of regions in Poland. The research sample consisted of all types of gminas (lowest administrative units in Poland), i.e. rural, urban-rural, urban, and cities with powiat (county) status. A classification method based on the pattern and anti-pattern of development in a dynamic perspective was applied in the analyses, which made it possible to compare the values of the synthetic measure of development over time. The data used in the study came from the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland and covered the years 2006–2021. The aim of the research was to determine the long-term economic path of development of the different types of gminas by voivodship (highest-level administrative unit in Poland). The novelty of the study is not only the fact that it covers a long research period, but, more importantly, that it allows the comparison of the effects of two crises (of a different nature) on the development of gminas. The first of them resulted from the collapse of the US real estate market in 2007, and the second was caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. A strong differentiation in terms of the level of development of the particular types of gminas was observed across voivodships, as well as a strong similarity of their development paths throughout the studied period. The results based on the dynamic measure of development also indicate that rural and urban-rural gminas were more resilient to crises than urban gminas and cities with powiat status. It also became evident that gminas were significantly more resistant to the negative effects of the pandemic than to the financial crisis.


Introduction
Quantitative and qualitative imbalances in the geographical distribution of resources and economic activities generate different levels of wealth and different degrees of control over local development (Capello, 2009). A regional development policy should take into account two characteristics of the regions it relates to: the differences in the level of socio-economic development of the areas (Bożek et al., 2021;Czyż & Hauke, 2015) and the different degrees of vulnerability and resilience to emerging crises depending primarily on their specialisation and level of urbanisation (Brakman et al., 2014;Christopherson et al., 2010).
The construction of regional policy tools should reflect the fact that regional development is not the sum of the 'levels' of development of the region's component administrative units, but the development of the component units is directly linked to the level of regional development (Adamowicz & Pyra, 2019). An important factor hindering the interpretation of the results of local surveys is also the 'fundamental oversimplification' of the binary division into urban and rural areas as their different functions do not form a fixed barrier delineating these two types of areas (Partridge et al., 2007). When conducting regional development policy, regardless of the prevailing paradigm of this development, we are often faced with the problem of assessing the degree and similarity of development between regions. The key research topic currently undertaken by scientists is to explain why regional economies differ in their resilience to various crises, which determines their highly geographically uneven effects over time and space, and the ability of these economies to adapt to major disruptions in the economic environment (Hu et al., 2022;Sensier et al., 2016). The aim of the research was to determine the long-term economic path of development the different types of gminas 2 (rural, urban-rural, urban, and cities with powiat 3 status) by voivodship. 4 In the above-described context, our study has the potential to contribute to the body of the existing research in question.
The measurement of the level and tracing the paths of regional and local socioeconomic development plays a crucial role in policy-making. It allows the allocation of resources across heterogeneous spaces and helps define policy priorities (Greco et al., 2018). The research approach used in this work not only made it possible to determine the long-term development path of different types of gminas, but also to determine their resilience to any emerging economic crises.
The novelty of our study, in addition to the fact that it uses data covering a long research period (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021) and takes into consideration the full population of Polish gminas, is that it allows the comparison of the effects of two crises of a different nature on the development of gminas. The first of them resulted from the collapse of the US real estate market in 2007, while the second was caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Literature review
European governments included a regional dimension in their response to the 2007-2009 global crisis by channelling additional funds that targeted all or selected regions or sectors (Davies et al., 2010). The observed effects as well as the results of the measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic varied among countries, regions and local government units due to five main factors: the importance and type of spending responsibilities, the degree of the sensitivity of subnational government revenues to economic fluctuations, the flexibility of fiscal frameworks, the pre-pandemic condition of local finances, and the scope and efficiency of governmental support (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2021).
The results obtained by Webber et al. (2018) suggest that regions have empirically identifiable long-run and path-dependent development trajectories that are shaped to a large extent by the national trajectories. Regions with greater proportions of inhabitants employed in sectors that are less susceptible to demand fluctuations are likely to experience more stable growth rates and be more resilient to economic downturns. Christofakis et al. (2019) found that Greek regions with more traditional activities located outside large cities or strongly urbanised regions were more 4 Wiadomości Statystyczne. The Polish Statistician 2023 | 8 resilient to crises than cities or urban centres. Areas most prone to permanent socioeconomic marginalisation are clusters of rural gminas and functionally-connected small towns, characterised by their peripheral location in relation to the largest agglomerations, poor transport accessibility, low level of human capital, and underinvestment in public infrastructure (Batóg & Batóg, 2021;Gray, 2014). Wang and Li (2022), using a multilevel logistic regression model, examined 284 Chinese cities in the period of 2003-2018 and found that there were five significant determinants of their economic resilience, namely: income inequality, innovation, government intervention, human capital and financial development. The researchers also showed that regional economic resilience was significantly affected by provincial trajectories. Nazarczuk (2015) concluded that the development of urban-rural and rural subregions depends on the distance to a major urban centre. The Australian experience indicated that local governments in areas dependent on housing and a single industry were the least resilient to the 2007 economic crisis (The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 2009). The results of Psycharis et al. (2014) for Greece showed that the most urbanised and highest-income regions were less resistant to the economic crisis than other regions, but at the same time benefitted from the recovery to the largest extent.
One important effect of emerging crises is their clear centre-periphery spatial pattern (Crescenzi et al., 2016), since their impact on regional and local finances varies greatly (OECD, 2021). Such disparities may become a barrier to maintaining a dynamic rate of development of the whole country or a specific region (Adamowicz & Pyra, 2019;Czyż & Hauke, 2015;Filipiak & Tarczyńska-Łuniewska, 2020), and the currently observed regional development disparities are likely to increase in the future (Bogdański, 2010).

Research method
As Bąk (2015) indicates in his work, previous research shows that there is no clear indication of which linear ordering procedures are best for both empirical and simulation data. In the analysis of the long-term development paths of gminas, a dynamic formulation of Hellwig's synthetic measure of development (SMR) was used (Hellwig, 1968). Hellwig's original method involves calculating a measure of development based on the distance between objects and the development pattern, which can result in negative values of this measure. Therefore, in this study, the normalisation process was based on the distance between the pattern (theoretical object with the best empirical values of variables) and the anti-pattern (theoretical object with the worst empirical values of variables). Dynamic approach means that a common pattern and anti-pattern were determined for the whole analysed period.
Outlier observations occurred in the different types of gminas, which may have had a significant impact on reducing the range of variability of the synthetic measure, causing problems with identifying the level of development of the objects under study. Diverse approaches to identifying and eliminating the negative impact of abnormal observations can be found in the literature (Batóg, 2015). These include, for example, correcting the coordinates of model objects (Głowicka-Wołoszyn & Wysocki, 2018) or median standardisation (Łuczak & Kurzawa, 2017). In this study, 16 objects recognised as outliers were eliminated, based on the level of the coefficient of variation characterising each variable.
The study for the period of 2006-2021 covered all Polish gminas, which were divided into cities with powiat status (66), urban gminas (242), urban-rural gminas (652) and rural gminas (1590). The study used data from the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland 5 . The evaluation of the level of economic development of the studied gminas was based on the following variables (available at the gmina level and guaranteeing that the sample was sufficiently varied): • the revenue of a gmina's budget per capita in PLN; • REGON 6 -registered entities per 1,000 population; • floor area of dwellings put into use per 1,000 population in m 2 ; • capital expenditure per capita in PLN; • employees per 1,000 population.
It is worth noting that for all the above variables, their higher values indicate a higher level of economic development.
The obtained results were presented for the different types of local government units aggregated within each voivodship and compared with the whole country. All four types of the analysed local administrative units were characterised by identical general trends of change in time. In the period under study, the development of cities with powiat status in individual voivodships varied greatly throughout the whole considered period (Figure 1). During the first crisis which reached Poland in 2009, the greatest slowdown in development occurred in groups of cities with powiat rights in Kujawsko-Pomorskie and Opolskie Voivodships. During the second crisis in 2020, the least favourable situation was observed in cities with powiat status in Mazowieckie, Podlaskie, Świętokrzyskie and Warmińsko-Mazurskie Voivodships. The highest improvement in the level of development of this type of cities occurred in Opolskie Voivodship, while the lowest in Warmińsko-Mazurskie (Figure 2).

Results
In the case of urban gminas, a division into two groups with distinct levels of development was observed. The first one comprised urban gminas with a higher level of the SMR measure located in Małopolskie, Pomorskie and Mazowieckie Voivodships (Figure 3). These also proved resistant to the crisis caused by the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and recorded the highest growth in development. The second group included urban gminas in Opolskie and Lubuskie Voivodships, which developed the slowest (Figure 4). The stagnation recorded in Lubuskie Voivodship began in as early as 2019, while Opolskie Voivodship lost its development momentum in 2020.
When observing the changes in the level of development of urban-rural gminas, one can see that Mazowieckie Voivodship lost its leading position in the last four of the studied years ( Figure 5). During the first crisis of 2009, the greatest slowdown in development occurred in urban-rural gminas in Łódzkie Voivodship, whereas the second crisis saw the highest decrease in the level of economic development in Dolnośląskie, Łódzkie and Opolskie Voivodships.
Urban-rural gminas in Łódzkie and Pomorskie Voivodships developed the fastest, while those in Lubelskie the slowest (Figure 6).
The development of rural gminas differed from the previously discussed types of gminas, since the hierarchy in terms of the development level remained unchanged: the ranking of the voivodships was similar each year (Figure 7). In 2009, the greatest slowdown in development occurred in some rural gminas in Wielkopolskie Voivodship, although in most voivodships, this type of gminas proved resilient to the first crisis. In 2020, rural gminas were slightly affected by the crisis only in Pomorskie Voivodship.
Compared to other voivodships, the highest increase in the level of development of rural gminas occurred in Dolnośląskie, while the lowest in Opolskie Voivodship (Figure 8).
When analysing the changes in the level of development of the different types of local government units during the last two economic crises, it can be concluded that they were significantly more resilient to the negative effects caused by the pandemic than the crisis that hit in 2009. Cities with powiat status and urban gminas showed particularly strong resilience in this case (see the Table), which is reflected by the high values of the positive increments of the SMR measure. Urban-rural and rural gminas were less sensitive to both periods of developmental instability. The crisis that reached Poland in 2009 significantly slowed down the development of cities with powiat status, as did the turmoil caused by the coronavirus in 2020 (Table 1). These findings are consistent with the results obtained in the studies conducted by Christofakis et al. (2019) and Psycharis et al. (2014).

Conclusions
In Poland, the different types of gminas in voivodships are characterised by a relatively heterogeneous level of development. However, at the same time, the results of the conducted research indicate that in the studied years, all types of gminas in Poland showed a similar pattern of economic development. The decrease in the level of the development of all considered gminas (with the exception of urban gminas) that occurred in 2016 were caused by a reduction in property investment resulting from the exhaustion of EU funds from the 2007-2013 financial perspective and the slow mobilisation of such funds guaranteed by the 2014-2020 perspective. The markedly different sensitivity of the different types of gminas to the negative effects of the COVID-19 crisis and the financial crisis that reached Poland in 2009 is also evident and consistent with the previous studies discussed in Hu et al. (2022). Cities with powiat status and urban gminas were highly resistant only to the COVID-19 crisis, while rural and urban-rural gminas were resilient to both crisis periods. In other words, financial economic downturns have a greater negative effect on local units with a higher level of urbanisation. Taking into account the development of all types of gminas over the whole period under study, the greatest increase in the level of local development occurred in Małopolskie Voivodship and the smallest in Warmińsko-Mazurskie and Świętokrzyskie Voivodships. Future research studying the impact of the war in Ukraine on the development of Polish territorial units would definitely prove valuable and complement the results presented in this paper.