Abstract:

The issue of structural changes from the point of shaping, and at the same time achieving sustainable economic growth through the efficiency of managing production factors (efficiency in the sense of Pareto) is a key area of research on changes in the structure of the economy as such. Sustainable economic growth is defined as continuous economic growth with full employment, accumulating innovations and increasing their share in the economy. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether the dichotomy of deindustrialization processes occurred in the Polish economy in the years 1995-2018. How and whether the occurrence of this phenomenon can be a suitable criterion for assessing the level of innovation in the sector     industrial. There is also a hypothesis that the key determinant (predominant factor) in the dichotomy of deindustrialisation processes in the Polish economy was the lack of innovation in the processing industry sector. To achieve the goal and verify the hypothesis, a statistical analysis of the key determinants of changes in the structure of the economy in terms of production and employment was used. Despite the fact that in the Polish economy, the growing demand, and above all GDP per capita, determined the share of the processing industry in total employment, and thus its production, causing the greatest increase in its share in total production in the entire period of 1995-2018. It was the very low level of innovation in the processing industry sector that caused its share in total employment to decline, being the main reason for the phenomenon of de-industrialization dichotomy, and thus the so-called "average growth trap" in the literature.