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Years of Poland in the EU - assessment of pros and cons [1199]
Poland was a very poor country in 1990s, even poorer than Ukraine and Belarus.
How so? One of the weird features of the Soviet Empire was that living standards were noticeably higher in the satellites (incl Poland) than even in the capital of Moscow. When and how did Belarus and Ukraine surpass Poland since ending the USSR was like falling over a waterfall for them?
the reforms prevented the rise of corrupt Oligarchs like in the Ukraine or Russia.
EU accession had almost nothing to do with preventing the rise of Eastern style oligarchs.
One analysis I read was that the way privatization was carried out in Poland (and neighboring non-Soviet countries) was far more open and leveled the playing field so that organized criminals (which did increase in number and scale in the early 1990s) didn't have so many easy targets to prey on and so they stalled out at a pretty low level.
The Soviet path to privatization created a visible class of easy targets for the criminals to prey on.
And the soviet economy was more based on things like resource extraction (aided and abetted by bottomless German desire for Russian gas and other resources) which are far more likely to become corrupted and give rise to oligarchs.
There were other cultural factors too that helped prevent organized crime from dominating society as happened in Eastern Slavic countries.
