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Research on evolution of the economic structure is an important part of the state-of-the art in economics. As basic indices indicating the significance of agricultural sector have been decreasing, it is important to study a role of the primary sector for employment. This is especially reasonable for rural areas. The main aim of the paper is to investigate transformation of employment structure across predominantly rural Polish subregions (NUTS 3), particularly, changes in employment in the primary sector. Data of the Central Statistical Office of Poland on the sectoral structure of employment in predominantly rural Polish subregions in 2010 and 2016 were applied for the shift-share analysis. All predominantly rural subregions were characterized by relatively high rates of employment in the primary sector, both at the beginning as well as at the end of the investigated period. However, the primary and secondary sectors were characterized by negative values describing the industry-mix effect (IM), which indicates negative impact of subregional specialization – employment in these sectors grow slower comparing to the national average. There are only 10 (out of 31) subregions characterized by positive values of the regional shift effects (RS). Alongside with a negative industry-mix effect, it indicates that the primary sector was a poor performer nationally as a sector of employment but performance was better in these subregions than at the national level. Negative values both for IM and RS (21 subregions) indicate that the primary sector was a poor performer nationally as a sector of employment and even poorer in these subregions than at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]