Local Comparative Advantage: Agriculture and Industrial Development in Poland, 1870-1939

This paper surveys the development of agriculture as a part of overall economic development in the major regions of Poland over the period of 1870 through 1973. It argues that the dramatic changes in market access of the various parts of Poland provide a key for understanding the modern economic development of the country. It is mainly due to differences in market access that we observe a divergence in terms of both employment shares in agriculture and agricultural productivity between the main regions of Poland up to the World War I, followed by significant but incomplete convergence during the interwar years. After World War II a very uneven implementation of economic policies preserved old structural differences between the regions of Poland and created new ones. The rest of this chapter has the following structure: I start in section II with a short outline of some theoretical background. Based on this, section III sketches the main changes in regional market access 1870 – 1973 at a regional level, while section IV describes in some detail the development of agriculture and economic development in the regions and for Poland as a whole. Section V concludes.