The scale and conditions of deagrarianisation in Poland

Deagrarianisation constitutes one of the regularities of the economic development. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly apparent also in Poland and manifests itself in, for instance, the decline in the importance of the agricultural sector as a type of occupation. However, the Polish economy is still characterized by high agricultural employment, which determines the low labour productivity in this sector and results in its weak adaptation to the functioning in the conditions of competition. Further changes in agriculture are subject to the labour outflow to other sectors. This process is one of the objectives of the Polish labour market policy. The paper examines the scale of deagrarianisation of employment and its exogenous and endogenous conditions in the Polish economy. The effects of the support of labour outflow from the agriculture, which had been implemented through the Cohesion Policy as well as the RDP in the years between 2007 and 2015, were also assessed. According to the research results, the process of deagrarianisation of employment is continuous and sustainable. It was determined by many various factors, which can be divided into two groups: internal – pushing the labour force out of agricuture (supply), and external – identifying the needs for employment outside agriculture (demand). As the analysis of ways and effects of the impact of projects financed from the EU funds on changes in agricultural labour resources proves that these initiatives contributed to the growth in non-agricultural employment, at different levels of effectiveness and sustainability of support depending on the type of allocation.