It is a story of a country that made a lot of the right decisions along the way. Managed to keep consistent high growth, not a pony trick or boom/bust mode.
Poland should be a role model for many other countries.
Recommend a book: https://www.amazon.com/Europes-Growth-Champion-Insights-Econ...
And Noah's blog post: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're looking at a mid-tier economy running on EU structural funds.
It's a great place to live, genuinely. But calling this "Poland's economy" is like calling a McDonald's franchise "your restaurant"
Later I bought even nicer motors, meant to provide exceptional control and feedback for tactile/haptic behaviours, and they were from Poland too.
Then I got to work on a robotic arm which contained a bunch of components from Poland. At this point it was clear to me that it wasn’t coincidence.
Finally, I built a drone with my kids and again, the motors are Polish. And they’re excellent.
They went from being a place I would only expect to encounter cultural food items from to a place that entered a high tech supply chain which seems to produce high enough quality components that I see them without seeking them out.
As a Canadian it made me very envious. We should be able to do this. I’ve seen a handful of Canadian motors in my life, and they were all blower motors a long time ago. Our ability to build cutting edge technology seems to be so limited as to be virtually irrelevant in most cases.
„Poland is the largest beneficiary of EU funds 2014-2020, with one in four euro going to Poland“
https://www.gov.pl/web/funds-regional-policy/poland-at-the-f...
Update: The comments below this are strange.
I ment: „Poland gets money, Poland transforms it into more money”.
Is Poland more efficient in it than other countries? I do not know. Would Poland have generated less money without it ? Probably? Is an annual investment of the 2-3%of the GDP into a country a lot? I think so?
All the polish I know that work in IT enjoy handwork as well. They are hard workers.
But also you start to notice that definitely a lot of people who left Poland are coming back, and with that skills and new economic opportunities.
The same has been happening in Slovakia; GDP growth per annum very comparable to Poland since 1995.
As a typical example my very German car has many components with "made in <Poland/Slovakia/Hungary>" on the side.
There is a while set of jobs in Pharma that got moved to Warsaw and no longer available in NL/DE.
Contrary to immigration wave from Ukraine (war refugees), immigrants from Belarus were mostly political refugees. They we mostly composed of politically and economically active people (as non-active people had no reason to emigrate). So even with less total number, immigrants from Belarus have higher contribution to Polish GDP per immigrant capita.
Poland is an underrated European destination (and I assume most Eastern European former USSR-aligned countries are too). If you haven't been you should definitely visit. I've been to both Paris and Warsaw recently and tbh I prefer Warsaw over Paris. Warsaw is clean (little graffiti, little trash on streets), safe, no homeless, etc and is a relatively high-trust society (another comment in this thread also mentioned that). Police actually enforce laws. The worst I saw was a drunk man on the street (although not violent or anything), and within minutes 4 police officers came to him. Few tourists. Everyone knows English.
Paris: I won't go into the negatives here (like the Africans/gypsies trying to scam you, sell you useless stuff, etc), it was nice overall, a little dirty, but I actually liked Warsaw better.
after Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK
I've been building software here for almost 20 years. Started a software house, grew it to ~50 people, sold it, now back to bootstrapping from scratch. The fact that this is a normal sentence to type from a Polish city is, honestly, kind of the whole story.
That "institutional framework" line in the article is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having run companies through Polish bureaucracy — it's fine. It works. A generation ago that bar was on the floor. Boring is a feature.
Politics aside, the 35-year arc has been quietly extraordinary. European to the bone, with old roots and a real appetite for what's next.
A significant percentage of the polish population participated in what is labled today economic migration.
They went Germany, Ireland, UK experienced an influx of migrants taking up all the low pay jobs.
But that was before the Russian bots took over the news on the internet and Russia-sponsored extreme right parties entered the parliaments. So the political effect from the migrants was roughly equivalent to their impact on pop
1. Hard working people
2. Biggest recipient of EU subsidies used for projects which generates more profit. Infrastructure, internet, etc. To compare, Czechia used it for stupid things like bicycle lanes, child playgrounds etc.
3. Building permit is very easy to get for basically anything. Yes, this way you can sometimes get chaotic new buildings, but this can be solved later. In comparison, in Czechia, obtaining a building permit is difficult and depends on the whim of the official. Also we have basically non-existent property taxes, so new homes are unaffordable for everybody and only used as an investment.
4. Not allowing imigration from countries where people don't want to work and with hugely different religions and customs. This worked for Czechia too though, our biggest immigrants are Ukranians which are also slavs and very hard working. Official statistics is, that they paid in taxes more than they got from social support.
What the US and most other western countries do are: Let infrastructure rot, defund education, reroute money to large corporations. This is how you end up with failed state.
It feels like despite overwhelming evidence presented in the own article that communism was bad, they felt they had to say something vaguely nice about communism. But they can’t even keep it going for more than a sentence, because the next sentence says actually education was better after communism.
- Access to the EU market
- Cheap labour
- 250 billion in EU subsidies
- it was kind of inevitable once Poland stopped being oppressed by its neighbors. The USSR, Nazi Germany, the German Empire / Prussia, Austria, Imperial Russia, etc. have basically been dividing the country since the 1780s. Without these restrictions, Poland is a natural leader in its region purely on population alone.
- A general lack of ideological “mind viruses” that seem to plague the western world. Most Poles are pretty straightforward, common sense people. They might have opinions you don’t agree with but it’s not a country of extremists in any direction.
- the general openness to American culture and (over)work ethics. I think Poland probably looks more to America than it does any EU country, although this of course isn’t simple, especially lately. But in general it’s a pretty hardworking, business-open culture. My impression is that it’s much easier to operate a business here than say, Germany, Italy, or France.
- Something I need to read more about, but IIRC Poland dealt with its oligarch problems in a different way than Russia or Ukraine did post-USSR and so doesn’t really have this issue.
Would they probably be doing better or worse if those people had stayed in power? Was that a significant factor in this?
The one thing that is a insurmontable barrier to go and live there (I considered that) is the healthcare sstem. It is completely broken.
You have free healthcare where people behave like beggars in front of the demi-god MD. They do not pay him for hs work, officially, but there is money slipped under he table to make things work. It is unbereable.
Then you have provate health care whichis not not bad, until you have a serious problem and you are back to the public system.
Finally the medicines/drugs are not refunded. You have to pay for them. This is wild for someone coming from France.
I think that if Poland upgraded that part of its politics it would be a country bringing in lots and lots of people useful for the country.
Of course being sandwiched between two extremely powerful regional hegemons did not serve Poland well. It's wonderful that it is now able to pick up the pieces. The poles no more than anyone the terrible realities that we must continue to be willing to fight for
However had, it also is still a net EU subsidized country:
https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
In fact, Poland gets the most money. So, before we can evaluate the net worth, this number would have to be deducted, which would instantly make Poland drop more than 5 ranks in that chart if you look at it. Just compare the numbers for yourself, the calculation is trivial to do.
Here is total GDP per country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
(You have to compare the same year of course; my calculation above is for the year 2024. Poland is now ranked higher than in 2024, but the net subsidies still are given in. Those "Poland is now rich" never take that into account.)
They have all the fundamental human-capital strengths of economies like Germany. It's really no surprise they're doing so well.
Sensible smart people working hard will get a lot done over time.
For what it's worth Poland is the only place I've ever visited where felt I could easily see myself living there. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of Poles are moving back.
I don't think quantum computing currently is able to help in the AI industry, I don't think this is having any impact.
WIG20 is essentially 5 banks, 3 energy providers, clothing, small shops + Allegro + CD Projekt Red. I don't think any of this has major world impact.
Fun story: the city of Nowy Sącz (80,000 habitants) has a very high percentage of millionaires compared to other cities. One of the reasons was that as the city is in a mountainous region hence not well communicated, the communist authorities were less strict there and allowed for private businesses to grow. As the communism ended, the region basically had a head-start compared to the rest of the country.
I think they're doing everything right and for their people
Have yet to visit. but even by just 2018 or 2019 I only would have jokes and a confused face if someone was telling me they had chosen a job or life in Warsaw as opposed to a bustling city in a Western European country. Now, I think I get it. Modern and cosmopolitan veneer, safety, opportunity, educated population, nationalist pride that isn't delusional, a sensical immigration policy being enforced before enforcing it becomes a human rights problem. I like it.
My mother (early 50s) still remembers clay houses that had two rooms, one for the people, one for the cows and the chickens. She never lived in one, but her grandmother did and she would visit for summer.
She would help her parents stand in line in the evening, waiting for a shipment of pasta or coffee to arrive in their local grocery store in the morning.
My father (similar age) didn't have an in-house bathroom until he got married.
Both of them had black-and-white TVs, where they'd see wonders like microwaves, answering machines or game consoles. Those were things that rich Americans had in movies, not things normal people had in their homes.
If you were well--off enough to go on vacation, you'd probably go to a seaside town, or maybe a village in the mountains. Certainly not abroad. A passport was an extravagance, not easy to get from the communist government.
People who lived in big cities, as opposed to much smaller villages, which were and still are a big thing in Poland, were a bit better off, but not by much.
In the 90s, My parents' village got wired up for telephone. Around that same time, Vietnamese NES clones (here called Pegasus) started popping up on the market. They may have been 15 years behind what the Americans had, but they were available at a price that almost any family could afford.
Shortly after I was born, they got a computer. At that time, computers were still expensive, not something every single family had, but definitely not something unusual for a working / middle class family to purchase. Satellite digital TV soon followed, and then came ADSL internet; because of no flat-rate calls, dial-up never really took off here.
As kids and young teenagers, we looked on iPods and iPhones with envy, those were for the rich, but knock-off mp3 players and cheap Nokia phones were things that many kids had.
Our train company, PKP, was famous for delayed trains and poor service. We used to expand the abbreviation as "Just wait, it'll arrive eventually."
None of this is true any more. Go to any Polish city now, and it's no different from any other European country, maybe except for being a good bit safer. You will see people with iPhones; we're still majority Android, but now that's mostly choice and habit rather than financial necessity. You will see people order food on Uber Eats using their gigabit fiber internet, and then Uber back from a night out. They may not even need to do that; both men and women feel pretty safe on the streets here, even at night. You will see kids playing their favorite games, on their PS5. You will see college students, working on weekends and after classes to make some money, take their boyfriends and girlfriends on trips to Greece, Italy or Spain. By airplane, of course.
That train company? In theory, the reputation is still there, but in practice, the statistics say what they say, we've far surpassed Deutsche Bahn in terms of punctuality.
I bet a lot of people here criticizing that EU funding went to Poland are typically Right Leaning, and think they are making a some killer point about socialism, when back home they are also taking in the hand out money.
For example, for the US to have a chance in the EU, it would first need to fix its YOLO fiscal policy of sustained 5.5% debt/gdp deficits.
We shall see in a few years as US's debt balloons and the average American becomes pseudo-slaves from a few overlords... to see if the EU is really bad as some Americans believe it to be.
Shocking.
Well done, UK. You really shat the bed and, by the look of it, still are. Diarrhea, possibly.
