A gloomy picture of Poland

Experts from the Adam Smith Center (CAS), an independent think tank, presented Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz with its 'Opening Report', which is a glimpse of the Polish economy at the beginning of the new government's term. The picture is not bright.

Andrzej Sadowski, deputy president of CAS, summarized the report by saying that Poland is a poor country where the GDP per capita is low, amounting to only 43 percent of the EU average, while unemployment is high, especially among young people, where it is currently at 40 percent. However, regardless of all these limitations and Poland scoring rather poorly on the list of business-friendly markets, Poles are the most entrepreneurial nation in the European Union.

According to Robert Gwiazdowski, president of CAS, labor in Poland is taxed like a luxury product. Gwiazdowski also underlined that entrepreneurs send on average half a billion pages of documents a year to different authorities and quoted the Kafkaesque truth that, "the heaviest shackles are made of legal paper."

The CAS report revealed that although until 1999 Poland was the fastest-developing country in the region, it fell below average in 2000. Even last year's 5.3 percent GDP growth was lower than in the other new members of the EU.

Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz declared that the trend will change. He announced that by the end of next year GDP would reach five percent and the budget deficit would be reduced from zł.32.6 billion planned by the former government to zł.30 billion.