A modelling project in Poland: the social and intellectual capital aspects

Several dozen simple forecasting models for a range of socio-economic indicators were developed for the NUTS 2 region of Mazowieckie voivodeship, the capital province of Poland, with 314 LAU 2 municipalities (gminas) being the basic units of modelling. Given that this set of municipalities encompasses the European-level agglomeration of Warszawa, several sub-regional centres, smaller towns and a multiplicity of small rural municipalities, the models reflect quite a selection of social, economic and resource situations, including rural areas of varied characteristics. In view of the broad range of the subject matter, the number of indicators modelled (around 70) and the orientation at the basic administrative units, the undertaking is unprecedented. Social and intellectual capital-related aspects were included among those modelled and the paper focuses on these from the methodological and substantive points of view, presenting some of the results and the conclusions drawn from them. We show that construction of such a varied and versatile model system is feasible, that it can be useful for pragmatic purposes, and that individual models of indicators (phenomena) can effectively represent the processes that are of importance at the local scale and, through aggregation, also regionally. In particular, the diverse courses of processes in the space of municipality types can be checked and verified.(1)