Poland should raise taxes: OECD
23:05
If Poland wants to maintain the current level of public debt, without changing its spending, it would have to increase tax revenues by the equivalent of 15 percent of total GDP, within 40 years, according to OECD data. This is the second-highest result among all countries of this organization. Of all these countries, only Slovakia would need to increase its tax revenues further without any debt or expenditure damage. Austria, Japan, and Belgium are located directly behind Poland.
Compared to other countries, in Poland, a particularly large part of the necessary additional tax revenues would be spent on pension payments.
The Polish economist and former deputy finance minister Ludwik Kotecki drew attention to the statistics presented by the OECD on Twitter. This expert applauded the thesis contained in the study. On the same Twitter, however, completely skeptical about these data was the economist of the World Bank prof. Marcin Piątkowski.
"Nice chart, but the long-term OECD forecasts did not come true earlier and will not come true, because they are based on the unlikely assumption that Poland will not attract any (sic!) immigrants for 40 years. Meanwhile, there will be at least 5 million more – over 2 million from Ukraine alone,” Prof. Piątkowski wrote.
According to him, the long-term low and now even real negative costs of financing mean that debt levels have a completely different meaning than before.
