Poland pays for lockdowns with the highest ever public debt

The actual debt of the Polish sector of the general government is approaching the impassable – according to the constitution – threshold of 60 percent of GDP. This is mainly the result of the high financial aid that has been granted to companies in recent months to save them from bankruptcy and to keep jobs. The pandemic caused the pace of Poland's indebtedness to accelerate sharply, and this results in, among others, high inflation. According to the economist of the Warsaw School of Economics, Dr. Artur Bartoszewicz, we cannot afford further comprehensive lockdowns and they should be used only on a point-by-point basis.
"If we were to deal with another wave of lockdown, the risk related to the deterioration of economic conditions and the risk of bankruptcy of enterprises would, of course, be significant, and the public finance system would be significantly violated. Today we financed the exit from the crisis with debt, and we cannot indefinitely indebtedness," Dr. Artur Bartoszewicz, an economist at the Warsaw School of Economics, expert of the Jagiellonian Institute, said.
The debt is not visible in the state budget itself, but it is published quarterly by the European Commission. At the end of the first half of 2021, the debt of the public finance sector calculated using the EU methodology amounted to exactly PLN 1,402,042 million. That's 57.4 percent of Polish GDP. This means that in one and a half years, Poland's debt increased by PLN 350 billion.
(Newseria)