Economic growth and system transformation

The fast economic growth in Poland following 1992 has resulted from a higher degree of advancement of the real transformation rather than from the formal progress of privatization. The "market mentality" has been more developed than in the neighbouring countries. Continuously low production costs make a profitable official export and border trading possible. The market mechanism dominates in the functioning of economy. The parliamentary elections of 1993, won by the pink-green coalition, have endangered the process, despite the former's programme-declared wish to continue the reforms. Privatization has been hindered and its status as a condition of success underestimated. Attempts at an instrumental approach to money has been observed. The dangers of budget deficit and public debt has not been recognized enough. Tendency to monopolization of some branches of economy and to restrict the free market have appeared. In economic policy one can notice the rebirth of the ideology of a wide-reaching state interventionism seen in terms of a legimitized centralism. The continued division of economy into the market and nonmarket sectors has made it impossible to change the structure of budget spending and to maintain strict financial and credit policy. In economical terms the absence of a costs and prices barrier poses the greatest danger. It leads to a fast growth of costs and prices and the loss of competitiveness by Polish products. On the other hand, the growth of foreign currency reserves by NBP (National Bank of Poland), much emphasized by the government, has not turned out to be inflatiogenic. The condition for strengthening the tendency for growth in economy is a full implementation of the systemic properties of market economy: microeconomic rationality based on private ownership, introduction of a free market mechanism and a stable, exchangeable currency which enforces rational behaviour. Because it is the high inflation that still poses the greatest danger to economic growth.Digitalizacja i deponowanie archiwalnych zeszytów RPEiS sfinansowane przez MNiSW w ramach realizacji umowy nr 541/P-DUN/201