The Economic Base of the Major Cities in Poland in the Political and Economic Restructuring Period

The article refers to the classical conception of economic base, which determines theoretical and methodological basement for research on functions of major cities in Poland. Beside updating on empiric knowledge about size and structure of the cities' economic base, there were attempts on defining direction of its rearrangement during system transformation, as well as on the cities' functional types. The dominance of the state capital becomes reinforced, often at the cost of a certain functional degradation of other cities. In most cities the economic base weakened, particularly in those which lost their rank of provincial centres in 1999 and in the industrial centres of the Upper Silesian conurbation. In the latter and in Wałbrzych the crisis in the urban economy is due to a large extent to the fact that it is based on the low-yield heavy and mining industry. An essential feature of the cities under study is the prevailing drop in diversification of the economic base, observed in as many as 32 cities. A concentration of employment surpluses is observed in select cities, which results in increased specialization of cities, especially in the realm of finance agency. That refers to a lesser extent to the traditional, more stable sections of economy, including education and health care. The leading role in most cities is still played by the production activity. The effect of the restructuring processes in economy is changes in the types of cities, observed in the division into sectors. Except for a few cases, the dominance of the production activities in the cities' economic base has been on the decrease in favour of an increase in the part of non-material services. As a result of those transformations, the character of the economic base of the major cities in Poland makes them closer to West-European cities