Poland being the powerhouse of Europe

Southern, the welfare of Polish horses is good enough.

Does your average Pole genuinely struggle to make ends meet, or is he having trouble only because he has to have his iPod and other modern 'necessities'?

What does it mean to be a powerhouse? Being in Russia, which I guess is an up-and-coming powerhouse, a few years ago, I was struck by how freakin' poor the people were.

Before you can even consider Poland being a powerhouse, let's see how Poland handles the EURO 2012

Merged:

Poland the Next Economic Powerhouse

The article's just a few days old, and there shouldn't be a paywall - so please read and discuss:

nytimes.com/2017/07/05/opinion/poland-economy-trump-russia.html

The Times rarely write about Poland, or at least not as much as I feel they could (more coverage of the PiS government would be nice). So it's nice to see an article like this.

Some excerpts for the lazy-bones out there:

"Now Eastern Europe is rising, just as quietly, with small nations like the Czech Republic leading the way. Poland is close on its heels. With a population of nearly 40 million and a half-trillion-dollar economy that is already the world's 24th largest, it is now big enough to put all of Eastern Europe on the global economic map."

nytimes.com/2017/07/05/opinion/poland-economy-trump-russia.html

There isn''t really anything new in that article that hasn't been said before and the treatment of the subject is pretty superficial, just filling a few column inches 'we haven't done anything on Poland for a while and Trump is going there'. In the short to medium term the outlook for Poland has been consistently good. However the author skims over the very real concern about lowering the retirement age in a nation with declining birth rates and trying to solve the problem by giving cash subsidies rather than better maternity/paternity leave policies, affordable childcare etc.

Back in 2012 the European Commission predicted that Poland's GDP per capita would decline from a potential 4.7% to 3% after 2021 and sure enough last year the International Monetary Fund lowered its 2017 forecast for Poland from 3.7% to 3.4. While it's not exactly gloom and doom, one can't be too complacent.

Poland will continue to dwarf all of its neighbors as an investment opportunity purely because of number of people and being in the EU. It doesn't matter who is in charge that has been the story since the mid 90s.

However to continue this after say 2025 then they will need to build more robust institutions - courts, capital markets, universities (I don't think that is happening)- and also to develop a more broad skill base (I think that is happening quite nicely, partly due to Poles gaining experience in U.K., Germany etc).

Not to be too pedantic, but that statement is factually not true. Poland neighbors Russia directly, as well as Germany. If Germany is to be considered an unfair comparison, then Russia should be comparable.

This data from 2014 shows Russia high above Poland in FDI per capita (it would not make sense to compare absolutes):

What's curious from this data is that Poland is in fact an investor nation. Russia has an FDI per capita of $492, while Poland is negative with -$119. At face value this indicates that Polish businesses find it more profitable to acquire/invest in foreign assets than deploy the capital at home. It's possible that if you strip out investments into energy projects from the mix, that Russia will have a profile more similar to Poland's, with money earned in Russia leaving the country, but as it stands it looks more attractive by the numbers. Slovakia and the Czech Republic are also far ahead of Poland by this measure. The New York Times article said as much in one of the paragraphs. The argument the author laid out there was not about large infusions from abroad, but rather a steady build up at home in traditional sectors that have disappeared or are close to disappearing in most other OECD countries, i.e. manufacturing.

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  FDI per capita (Europe - 2014)
  

Kaliningrad party!

Obsolete data since the sanctions and collapse in oil price. Russia isn't comparable to Poland, Poles are vastly richer.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_received_FDI

Slightly more up to date, show Polands per capital FDI several times that of Russia