The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the resilience of the labour market in the Polish-German borderland

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic quite strongly disrupted the existing trends in the evolution of employment in the Polish-German borderland. The objective of the article is to analyse how resilient Polish and German municipalities are to the COVID-19 pandemic. Border regions, due to their specificities, are characterized by weaker resilience to negative external factors, which meant that the COVID-19 pandemic had a detrimental effect and caused an upturn in unemployment. The empirical part of the study concerns the Polish-German borderland as a clear example of the described tendencies. The research method used in the study is the counterfactual before-after comparison method, which fills the gap in the literature regarding research of cross border regions and develops the existing approaches. This approach is novel in studying the hypothetical rate of unemployment. The results of the survey indicate that the unemployment rate in the Polish-German borderland area has risen (after and due to the pandemic). There are significant differences in how the pandemic has affected the labor market. Utilizing the counterfactual approach, this difference can be described as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market.