POZNAN, Poland (AP) — A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour and its citizens earned just one-tenth the wages of West Germans. Today, its economic size has surpassed Switzerland’s, becoming the 20th largest in the world, with an annual output value exceeding US$1 trillion.
It’s a historic leap from the post-communist ruins of the 1989-90s to today’s European growth champion, and economists say it offers lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people, with the Trump administration saying Poland should be recognized for its presence at the Group of 20 major economies summit later this year.
This shift is reflected in people like Joanna Kowalska, an engineer from Poznan, a town of 500,000 people between Berlin and Warsaw. She returned to China after five years in the United States
“I’m often asked if I missed anything back in Poland, and to be honest, I think it’s quite the opposite,” Kowalska said. “We are ahead of the United States in many areas.”
Kowalska works at the Poznan Center for Supercomputing and Networking, which is developing Poland’s first artificial intelligence factory and integrating it with quantum computers, one of 10 on the continent funded by an EU program.
After graduating from Poznan University of Technology, Kowalska worked at Microsoft in the United States, a job she considered “a dream come true.”
But she said she missed the “sense of purpose.”
“Especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, this technology is starting to develop so quickly in Poland,” Kowalska added. “So it’s very tempting to come back.”
Guest invitations to the G20 summit are mostly symbolic; since the original G20 finance ministers’ meeting in 1999, no guest country has been promoted to a full member, which requires unanimous decision-making by all members. Additionally, countries were initially selected based not only on their GDP rankings, but also on their “systemic importance” in the global economy.
But the gesture reflects a statistical fact: In 35 years (slightly less than a person’s working life), Poland’s GDP per capita will rise to $55,340 in 2025, or 85% of the EU average. That’s up from $6,730 in 1990, 38% of the EU average and now roughly equivalent to Japan’s $52,039, according to International Monetary Fund figures in current dollars and adjusting for Poland’s lower cost of living.
Since joining the EU in 2004, Poland’s economy has grown at an average annual rate of 3.8%, easily exceeding the European average of 1.8%.
Marcin Piątkowski of Kozminski University in Warsaw and the author of a book on Poland’s economic rise said it was not just one factor that helped Poland escape the poverty trap.
One of the most important factors, he said, is the rapid establishment of a strong business institutional framework. These include independent courts, antitrust agencies to ensure fair competition, and strong regulation to prevent troubled banks from halting credit.
As a result, the economy has not been hijacked by corrupt practices and oligarchs like elsewhere in the post-communist world.
Poland also benefited from billions of euros in EU aid before and after it joined the EU in 2004 and entered its vast single market.
Most importantly, there is broad consensus across Poland’s political spectrum that Poland’s long-term goal is to join the EU.
“The Poles knew where they were going,” Pietkowski said. “Poland has downloaded the institutions and rules of the game that the West spent 500 years developing, and even some cultural norms.”
Although Communism was oppressive, it broke down old social barriers and opened higher education to factory and farm workers who had previously not had the opportunity. The post-communist boom in higher education means that half of young people now hold a degree.
“Young Poles, for example, are better educated than young Germans,” Piatkowski said, but they earn half as much as Germans. It’s an “unbeatable combination” to attract investors, he said.
Solaris, a company founded by Krzysztof Olszewski in Poznan in 1996, is one of Europe’s leading electric bus manufacturers, with a market share of approximately 15%. Its story illustrates one of the hallmarks of Poland’s success: entrepreneurship, or the willingness to take risks and create new things.
Olszewski, who was educated as an engineer under the communist government, opened an auto repair shop where he repaired Polish cars using spare parts from West Germany. Katarzyna Sazek, an economist at Poznań University of Economics and Business, said that while most businesses were nationalized, authorities allowed small private workshops like his to operate. “These are private-sector enclaves,” she said.
In 1996 Olszewski opened a subsidiary of the German bus company Neoplan and began production for the Polish market.
“Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004 gave us credibility and access to a broad, open European market with free movement of goods, services and people,” said Mateusz Figaszewski, responsible for institutional relations.
We then made the risky decision to start producing electric buses in 2011, when few people in Europe were experimenting with this technology. Figaszewski said large Western companies would suffer even greater losses if the switch to electric vehicles was unsuccessful. “This becomes an opportunity for technological leadership ahead of the market,” he said.
Poland still faces challenges. Because of low birth rates and an aging society, there will be fewer workers to support retirees. Average salaries are below the EU average. While SMEs are booming, few have become global brands.
Poznan Mayor Jacek Jaśkowiak sees domestic innovation as the third wave of Poland’s post-socialist economic development. In the first wave, foreign countries opened factories in Poland in the early 1990s to take advantage of the local skilled population.
At the turn of the century, Western companies brought more advanced branches, including finance, information technology and engineering, he said.
“Now is the time to start such a complex activity here,” Jaśkowiak said, adding that one of his main priorities is investing in the university.
“There is still a lot to be done in terms of innovation and technological progress,” adds Szek, the Poznan economist. “But we keep climbing the ladder of added value. We are no longer just a spare parts supplier.”
Students in Sarec say more needs to be done to reduce urban-rural inequality, provide affordable housing and support young people starting families. They say Poles need to acknowledge that immigrants, such as the millions of Ukrainians who fled Russia’s invasion in 2022, contribute to an economy with an aging population.
“Poland’s economy is so dynamic and there are so many opportunities for development, of course I would stay,” said Kazimierz Falak, 27, one of Sarzec’s graduate students. “Poland has a lot of hope.”
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McHugh reported from Frankfurt, Germany.
