opinion

Seize the Opportunities Offered by a Turbulent World

It is by no means a given whether the current decade will be another decade of growth. It is no longer enough to merely go with the flow of global events and economic convergence. Poland has the potential to be among the winners that gain from the current situation in the medium to long term, but in times like these, we need to bet on new people who are forward-looking visionaries

Poland has undoubtedly achieved success over the past thirty years. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is now more than 3 times higher than in 1990. The compound annual growth rate was 3.7 percent over that period. Some international institutions rank Poland as a high-income country. According to the World Bank, Poland comes second after South Korea in how soon it joined the group (it took Poland less than 15 years to move from the middle-income group). Nearly 85 percent of the world’s population live in countries where the average income per capita in purchasing power parity is lower than in Poland.

Poland embarked on the path to development under very positive external circumstances of global changes that favoured Central and Eastern Europe. However, the last decade has brought an increasingly rapid deterioration of those conditions. Although Poland still has the potential to continue on its development path, several of its features, especially social and political ones, under deteriorating external conditions may set in motion a spiral of negative feedback, which could in the extreme case undermine the successes of the past 30 years. The rapidly deteriorating demographics is also a factor.