“Why is Poland’s Regional Unemployment so Persistent?”

This paper addresses the issue of Poland's regional unemployment persistence using a flow approach to labour market dynamics based on the longitudinal structure of LFS data relative to the period from 1994 to 1997. Age, skills and comparative advantages seem to be the most important determinants of the higher inflows to unemployment in high unemployment voivodships. Moreover, unobservable differences explain a sizeable part of the regional inflow. This result serves as a warning against the idea of separating sectoral from cyclical components of mismatched unemployment