New paper: “Mapping the indirect employment of hard coal mining: A case study of Upper Silesia, Poland”
The new open access article entitled “Mapping the indirect employment of hard coal mining: A case study of Upper Silesia, Poland”, produced by Jan Frankowski, Joanna Mazurkiewicz & Jakub Sokołowski, is now published at Elsevier’s Resources Policy Journal!
The paper aims to estimate the scale of indirect jobs in Europe's largest hard coal mining region, Upper Silesia and categorise them as mining-related or mining-dependent. In addition, the paper provides a detailed overview of the structure and spatial distribution of mining-related companies, utilising information from public tenders offered by five of the country's largest coal enterprises, as well as financial and employment data from official administrative repositories.
The results indicated:
- A significant agglomeration effect in the region, with companies located within 20 km of the nearest active hard coal mine receiving 80% of all tender revenues.
- 41% of all identified jobs in mining-dependent companies in Upper Silesia are at high risk of liquidation if there is a decline in coal production.
Lastly, the article argues in favour of labour market mitigation policies tailored explicitly to mining-dependent employees and suggests the widespread use of administrative data in just transition planning to address the limitations of dominant top–down modelling approaches.
Read the full paper here!