Publications

This book, edited by Carlos Gradín, Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, and Kunal Sen, investigates the trends in earnings inequalities in developing countries to determine the main drivers, focusing on structural and occupational changes. It includes a cross-country analysis and country case studies of 11 low- or middle-income countries that have experienced strong transformations. In the cross-country chapter. In the cross-country chapter, Piotr Lewandowski, Albert Park, and Simone Schotte studied the evolution of country-specific routine task intensity for 87 countries that cover 75% of global employment and presented stylized facts on the global divergence in the de-routinisation of jobs. Open-access pdf and the dataset with country-specific routine task intensity of occupations are available.

In the early 2000s, Poland's unemployment rate reached 20%. That is now a distant memory, as employment has increased noticeably and the unemployment rate had dropped to 3.4% in 2021. The labor force participation of older workers increased following reforms aimed at prolonging careers. However, participation remains low compared to most developed countries and the reversal of the statutory retirement age in 2017 leaves Poland vulnerable to the effects of population aging. Rising immigration has eased the resulting labor shortages, but women, people with disabilities, and agricultural workers remain underemployed. During the Covid-19 pandemic the slowdown in economic growth and increase in unemployment were small.

Energy poverty, i.e., inefficient heating and insufficient access to energy services, can turn a shelter into a health hazard. We find that substandard housing and ineffective heating is associated with a higher risk of poor health in an urban context. We surveyed people living in two middle-sized cities in a coal-dependent region of Poland and used objective and subjective indicators of energy poverty and self-assessed health status. We demonstrate that people who live in substandard housing are more likely to exhibit poor musculoskeletal and cardiovascular outcomes, by 10 and 6 pp, respectively than otherwise similar people living in suitable housing conditions. We show that energy-poor people who use coal or a wood stove have a 24 pp higher likelihood of respiratory disease than the energy-poor who live in flats connected to district heating. We also find that a significant amount of the explained variance in the probability of respiratory disease is attributable to energy poverty. To improve the housing conditions and reduce the risk of poor health outcomes, we recommend two policy instruments: 1) a full subsidy for thermal retrofits and connecting multi-family buildings to the district heating network and 2) a targeted energy voucher for clean heating.

We construct survey-based measures of routine task intensity (RTI) of jobs consistent with those based on the U.S. O*NET database for workers in 47 countries. We find substantial cross-country differences in the content of work within occupations. We assess the contribution of technology, supply of skills, globalization, and economic structures to the variation of workers’ RTI across countries. Technology is by far the most important factor. Supply of skills is next in importance, especially for workers in high-skilled occupations, while globalization is more important than skills for workers in low-skilled occupations. Occupational structure explains only about one-fifth of cross-country variation in RTI.

We study the labour market transition pathways driven by the coal phase-out in Poland between 1990 and 2050. We apply the concept of branching points to describe the coal transition in the context of structural and labour supply changes and educational upgrading. We show that in the 1990s and 2000s, job opportunities for miners were scarce, as the trajectories of these trends deteriorated their labour market prospects. As these trends have reversed in the 2010s, the future employment outlook of the coal phase-out in Poland is more favourable than in the past. Decarbonisation will lead to a surplus of Polish hard coal mining workers from 2030, yet the projected shortages of workers in other sectors will create opportunities for reallocation.