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Poland's Economy Is Booming! The EU's Success Story? [711]
is there a comment to accompany this ?
Peter. It's about time you stopped listening to the smiling polish economists who invite you to shirt and tie functions in Poland in order to gleam selected facts and figures to show how fantastically well the Polish economy is doing. Economists are like Politicians and Enviromentalists. They all have an agenda and all make money from Gerrymandering the figures. If the Polish press/government gave and idea of the true situation in Poland then their would be riots on the streets.
From now on ask the 'real' polish people who are 'living' in Poland what the reality is...
Falling unemployment is due to mass emmigration on a whole and nothing else.
The number of people in work in Poland has hardly fallen as the GDP has been 'dramatically' rising take a look at the Employment rate.....
15-64 year old in employment
1997 58.9%,
2011 59.7% a massive rise of 0.8%!
(so 0.8% of 30million is 240K people and you have to remember that it will be less then this as it's only the 15-64 year old range...so probably at most 200,000k extra jobs). So with a minimum wage of less then gbp300 per month and the perceived mass investment in Poland this is hardly an indicator of a highly successful economy.
When you compare these figure with UK (with a decrease of GDP and a recession and companies leaving for cheaper production) 1999 71% and 2011 69.5% a drop of 1.1% (although with mass immigration there are probably more people employed)
as a futher example here are how some of the old eastern bloc countries fare against poland....
slovenia 58.1 to 59.5 (up 1.4%)
estonia 61.5 to 65.1 (up 3.6%)
bulgaria 50.4 to 58.5% (up 8.1%)
eu member states (27) 61.8 to 64.3% (up 2.5%)
Therefore as an economist what can you gleam from the fact that the Polish economy in the past 20 years has seen a lower rise in Employment then it's other neighbours?
You should never look at the unemployment figure as a representation of how well an economy is doing. As you well know goverments tend to 'massage' figures for their own means.