Despite the historical, close Hungarian-Polish friendship, we barely know anything about the history of the Poles from the past three decades. We need to make up for this because in Europe, the Poles have the most to teach us on how to lead a country into the future following communism.
Successful Polish development
Between 1991 and 2020, Poland achieved the greatest economic and social development among the V4 countries. While in 1990, the Polish GDP per capita was 39.6 percent of the EU27 average, in 2020 it was already 75.7 percent. Overall, their rates increased by 36.1 percent – nearly as much as what they started with. This is significantly better than the Czech (+11.6 percent), the Hungarian (+17 percent), and the Slovakian (+24.9 percent) increases.
The Polish economy grew at an average rate of 3.6 percent per year, the best in the region between 1991-2020. This is also one of the best growth rates in the EU. The “sustainable” nature of their growth is particularly notable: since the regime change, they have been able to grow every year. In fact, they were the only EU Member State to continue growing their GDP between the 2007-2009 crisis. In 30 years, Poland has moved from the last place among the V4 countries to second, after the Czechs.
Polish development stems from the Polish model
Two thirds of Poland’s development took place between 2006 and 2020. This indicates that Poland took better advantage of EU succession, and better handled the 2007-2009 crisis, the Greek and then euro crisis after the global financial crisis, and finally, the crisis of 2020-2021, compared to the other EU Member States. Thus, the Polish development model is evidently effective in taking advantage of booms and dealing with crises.
Their huge jump ahead in comparison to Hungary occurred in a single year as Poland was able to grow in 2009 as well by 2.8 percent – while the economic downturn in Hungary was rather drastic (-6.6 percent). After 1990, the Polish economy proceeded ahead with small steps towards the Hungarian lead. After 2006, this turned into larger steps, and in 2009, their enormous 9 percent jump minimized the gap between the two economies. The successful Hungarian economic policy turnaround after 2012 brought the two countries neck-and-neck, and by 2019 we even managed to get ahead of our Polish friends. However, their better performance in the 2020-2021 crisis pushed them ahead of us.