The purpose of this article is to compare economic discussion on privatisation, expected privatisation outcomes and actual results in Poland. First it discusses the privatisation of state enterprises in the broader context of the economic transformation programme designed and introduced at the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990. It examines the choice of privatisation methods, the political economy of privatisation and the three major policy issues: pace of privatisation, sequence of privatisation and the authority to initiate and carry out privatisation. The final section compares privatisation blueprints and actual results. The appendix presents a detailed technical guide to the privatisation methods in Poland and a basic set of figures illustrating the outcome.
The paper presents an analysis of the shift in the ownership policy of the Polish government in office since 2015 towards a more active role of the state and a more reluctant attitude towards privatisation. This shift reflects a general change in the paradigm of the role of the state towards the concept of the state as a strong market player, which includes the strengthening of its ownership functions. Among others, it has led to stalling the privatisation process and concentrating only on its fiscal goals. Possible factors causing this statist shift are divided into two dichotomic groups: the government’s good faith vs. the impact of rent-seeking interest groups and endogenous vs. exogenous factors. Our main conclusion is that despite similarities with the trends observed in some other countries, endogenous factors such as increasing capture of the state by rent-seeking groups, and not the exogenous ones, including the global financial crisis, contributed most to the growing statist trends in the Polish state’s ownership policy.
We discuss the emerging economic systems of Poland and Hungary using the state capitalism approach and suggest some general lessons. We define state capitalism in the broad and narrow senses and propose six major manifestations of state capitalism of the populist variety, and five major state capitalism tools. Applying this framework to the post-Soviet, transition economies context, we discuss the origins of state capitalism formation in Poland and Hungary. We focus on specific features of the populist variety of state capitalism in these countries, including the relative importance of political capitalism, oligarchy, and the use of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as the source of rents, as well as the varieties of state control over the enterprise sector. We point out that the specific economic policies implemented in the two countries are conditioned by the past. We also underline the discrepancy between the features resulting from post-communist path dependence and the contemporary influences, mainly related to the membership of both countries in the EU.
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The aim of this study is to explain the special feature of the contemporary Polish economy which is the lack of oligarchy after 30 years of the post-communist transformation.The article consists of three parts. The first covers the theoretical and methodological framework for further analysis. We present the definitions and classifications of oligarchy and oligarchic systems in the modern world and provide a brief overview of the literature on the subject and the state of knowledge.In the second part, we explain the lack of an oligarchic system in Poland, linking this fact with specific elements of the socialist heritage and with the model of economic transformation and privatisation adopted in this country during the first years of the systemic reforms.In the third part, we present two paradoxes that are related to the oligarchisation of post-communist economies and, indirectly, to the assessment of the Polish path of economic and political transformation. We show that oligarchy and the relatively large sector of state-owned enterprises determine two different models of rent-seeking. The aim of this study is to explain the special feature of the contemporary Polish economy which is the lack of oligarchy after 30 years of the post-communist transformation.
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