TAXONOMIC ANALYSIS OF DIVERSITY OF LOCAL LABOUR MARKETS IN POLAND

The situation in the labour market is conditioned by many factors that often have a local dimension. Identification of different levels of development of labour demand as well as potential of labour supply on the local level is a crucial element of diagnosis of reasons for regional and local diversity and implementation of an appropriate labour market policy. As there is available a variety of indicators describing regional labour relations, there is a need to create synthetic measure to include different aspects of the labour market situation. The aim of the paper is identification of the diversity of the situation in the local labour markets of all 16 Polish voivodeships. At the first step, a synthetic measure including eight variables was created. At the second stage 16 Polish voivodeships were clustered following Ward’s and k-means methods. As the authors assume that the position of voivodeship labour markets is connected with the position of capital cities, the analysis was deepened by ranking voivodeship cities based on Hellwig’s method. As a result of conducted research and the classification of Polish voivodeships and their capital cities in the context of the situation in the labour market, there have been identified the reasons of regions’ positions and proposed recommendations for the labour market policy.