Enter plan Belka

Belka emphasizes the urgency in making life easier for businessesIt may have taken a hundred days, but at last it looks as though the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD)-led government is ready to go public with a comprehensive plan aimed at revitalizing Poland's moribund economy.
At a WBJ Business Breakfast last week, Finance Minister Marek Belka said the government would unveil its three-pillar program this Tuesday that will focus on reforming public finance, promoting entrepreneurship and easing stiff labor laws. Although short on details, Belka emphasized the urgency in making life easier for businesses, particularly by lowering crippling social security obligations and introducing regional variations to the minimum wage so the poorest areas can become more cost-competitive. Belka also talked about significant tax breaks for the lowest bracket of wage earners.Businesses, investors and the public have anxiously awaited the "Belka Plan," as Prime Minister Leszek Miller dubbed it later in the day, since the SLD took office in October. Government discussions on how to remedy the economy need to move beyond the rhetorical attacks on the Monetary Policy Council (RPP), though Miller did caution that Belka's plan was based on the assumption that interest rates would continue to be lowered. (A fair assumption given that inflation is at a post-transition low.)
When Belka's four-year strategy is unfurled, it will be interesting to see just how far he goes, and whether the public - and other members of the cabinet - will have the stomach for his proposals. Further labor code reform and cuts in public spending will not sit well with a number of voters, due to take to the polls in local elections this spring. It will also be revealing to learn what Miller is willing to endure to resuscitate the economy. Early last week Belka dropped a bomb that Miller quickly defused - that the way to generate more revenue for the health and education sectors is to start charging Poles for their services. That was blasphemy as far as the prime minister's party of ex-communist social democrats is concerned. At the business breakfast, Belka remarked wryly that he would be willing to talk more about the proposals that put him in the doghouse with his boss, but only in private.Overall, Belka appears to have a firm grasp of the maladies that are sucking the life out of Poland's economy, and a good sense of the magnitude of the structural changes needed to turn things around.
We can only hope that Miller's decision to name the forthcoming plan after its creator wasn't to distance himself in advance from the man he may later feel compelled to blame should the plan not live up to expectations.