€80 billion for Poland new EU budget

From the customer side that's almost exactly what I want to happen.

I don't want one company monopolising the whole market, I want better, cheaper, safer etc... through competition.

I understand that the E.U. and other countries have to protect themselves from becoming nothing but consumers and buying everything from China but we aren't discussing that.


Poland builds the parts that go into them :)

At this stage it seems like all cars are made in the same factory, they just put a different emblem on'em just before they leave the factory :)

By initial I mean this post:


Of course I do understand what you mean in general, but that post sounded very condescending that's why I picked on you about that.

Not necessarily. You HAVE to have car insurance (a service) if you own a car (a product). You have to have insurance and probably a mortgage (both services) if you want to own a house (a product). Every laptop needs software, and admin staff to help you use it. Every mobile phone needs people making sure you paid your bill, and to check the antennae are working every day, and that the data is backed up.

You only sell a product once, but the service that goes with it generates money for years afterwards, in maintenance fees, insurances, billing and so on. And that means for every factory worker employed, there are five more keeping the product "in service".

Poland currently has a healthy mix of all three business sectors (primary; mining and farming, secondary; manufacturing, and tertiary; services). This is the basic formula that has protected it during the crisis. But the fact that Poland doesn't have its "own brand" car or mobile phone or watch is nothing to be ashamed of. Britain used to have 140 car manufacturers after WW2, now it has, hmmm, 3? And yet it still manages to employ around 180,000 in car manufacturing, and 640,000 in car-related services.


Important how? Economically? Militarily? You need money to do that...

Having world-wide contracts means ' nada ' the question we must ask is did the Swedish investors buy a company which already had financial difficulties?

Ask yourself a question would all you Poles prefer to have TPSA as a monopoly or are you satisfied with the current deregulated market for telecoms?

Actually it means they have very good position on the market.The problem started when the Swedes took part in another project in Poland and it failed.It was their right of course since it was their company but now many ppl don't know what's going to happen.And if that company is going to bunkrupt my region is going to hurt badly.

Given the choice, even in the worst possible case would be staying in the EU and getting 60 billion Euro for nothing, or leaving and getting none of that - it's a pretty easy solution.


Poland is almost certainly (if current trends continue) going to become a source of very highly educated individuals who speak multiple languages - which means that logically speaking, it will become the home of a knowledge-based economy. Poland's already punching well above her weight when it comes to IT - and could easily become much stronger. One thing that's often not mentioned here is just how strong the IT infrastructure is - and how cheap it is compared to elsewhere. Try getting a 100mb cable connection (that actually does come close to that speed consistently) in Western Europe for 70zl a month...

The only thing that Poland is doing poorly at the minute is building bridges between the EU and Russia - but Russia can shoulder most of the blame for that.

Polish gov has more than enough money to fix the roads without any foreign subsidies. One of main reasons why the roads here got so ****** was that for many years govs were hardly investing in them following the "soon we will be in EU, they will give us billons to fix roads" reasoning. So instead of spending on roads, they could keep overblown administration, buy votes of plebs through various social spendings etc.


It's not really a zero sum game. Billions are being wasted each year and there's no pressure to put a stop to that, why do anything ? "EU will give us money" and problem solved. Subsidies are not working well, no matter if received by individuals, companies or countries. They spoil receivers and promote mismanagement.


No it isn't. It helps "rich" expand the real economy and create artificial one in "poor" countries. These days we can see very well how it ends up. Germany is doing well as their companies were getting fat due to flooding "poor" with their products, southern Europe is struggeling despite a fact that they were getting many billions from EU budget for many years.


Typical pink ignorance :))

Oh dear. That's not true in the slightest - the roads were in a diabolical state in 1990. I've got several books that reference this. Post 1990, the money went to prop up the railways which were unionised to hell - there simply wasn't the money to build roads too. In fact, the same applied in the PRL - hence the failure to build the A2 to any decent length.


Southern Europe is struggling because they spent way beyond their means. Catalonia is a fantastic example of this - and the nonsense that is local government in Italy also opens eyes.

That's what upsets me with westerners and western media. They've been lead to believe that EVERYTHING that has improved in Poland after it joined the EU is because of the EU and the money it gives. For every euro the EU gives Poland Poland has to give one also, sometime 2! Poland's economy was growing quite steadily before the EU.


Actually that's partially true motorway and expressway building speeded up in the mid 1990s then stopped right by 2000.


The state of Poland's roads can be blamed on money, or rather lack of. There were ambitious plans during the Gierek era but since most of the western loans were squandered or spent on useless projects we see the results to this day.

That's not true PB - not true at all. Poland is a massive net receiver of EU funds - if you look at the last budget cycle, the numbers are huge - incredibly so.


Steadily, but from a very very low base. The figures from 2004-2008 cannot be argued with - have a look -



There really wasn't much being built then - I've got an excellent map somewhere that shows how the construction progressed - it was pretty much minimal at that point.


Not everything, but anyone driving around Poland can see the EU flag everywhere on huge construction projects. Most of these simply wouldn't get done as quickly without EU cash.


Pretty much. The stupidity of the spending of those loans was unbelievable - instead of focusing on buying licences to produce consumer products, they sunk so much money into 'moustache-socialist' projects.

It was also partially stolen by our own corrupt politicians and there are claims that the Russians too had a hand in this. Investing large sums of money in steel mills (a thing of the past) in the 1970s?? No one in the west would have done suck a dumb thing.

"Around 1% of our GDP growth since 2008 is because of EU money," said Poland's Regional Development Minister Elzbieta Bienkowska.

"That's almost 300,000 jobs. It's an enormous change, a kind of miracle I would say."

Cohesion funds are not designed to work alone. There has to be matching investment on a national level. In Poland the result is that GDP per capita has risen from just over 40% of the EU average when it joined the Union in 2004 to nearly 70% now.

"We would probably have made this progress in about 20 years if we had been forced to go it alone, without EU development money," Mrs Bienkowska said.

bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20318959

'Nearly five months after the final whistle at the European football championships, economists and officials say that Poland is reaping the benefits.
According to the London-based Brand Finance Institute, Euro 2012 helped lift Poland up its 100-nation ranking, from 24th to 20th.

In financial terms, the value of the brand "Poland" jumped 75 percent.

"The impact on our image is going to be long-term," said Joanna Mucha, Poland's sport and tourism minister.

The 677,000 fans who flocked to Poland may be worth their weight in gold -- and not only because they spent 1.1 billion zloty (266 million euros, $341 million), or 33 percent more than forecast.

A mighty 92 percent of foreign supporters surveyed by the PBS Institute in Poland at the end of Euro 2012 said they would recommend it for a holiday, and 80 percent aimed to come back.

In 2011, three million foreign tourists visited this nation of 38 million. Experts forecast that number will grow by 766,000 a year through to 2020.

I get the idea - build large State owned enterprises that would get people out of the villages and into work that could be exported profitably to the West. It's not often mentioned, but subsidised Polish coal almost certainly led to the destruction of the British coal mining industry. But Gierek really should have known that there was no way that the Communist state could build such things without huge problems with corruption.

They would have been far better off implementing a variation of the Yugoslav self-management idea - let the workers own the factories, but limit the financial intervention to only providing loans for such places to open to begin with. The Yugoslav idea collapsed because the republics wouldn't let the workplaces go bankrupt - but if this had been a serious threat in Poland, the workers would have done what it takes to keep the place alive - especially if the alternative was some horrific State-sponsored work that really existed to keep people in food, shelter and clothing and absolutely nothing else.

You mean buy out shares?



No doubt. My father's family were farmers during communist times he went to school and wanted nothing to do with it, became a manager or a supervisor at an armament plant. He told me how his family work very hard all their lives, there was absolutely no money in it. The had a house, food, some clothes. If it wasn't for the grandparents sending money from France they could have never afforded to buy a car. People were eager to work but for something. In the Soviet Union after Gorbachev came to power he allowed the collective farmers to grow small plots behind their homes. Those tiny plots produced some 30% of the USSRs grains, tomatoes, potatoes, fruits etc. A huge bountiful land land Russia had to import grain from the US? what a joke. People didn't do their job because there was nothing in it for them.

It's a tricky concept to explain, but basically, the State funded the enterprises, but the workers owned and managed them. The problem with the Yugoslav implementation was that the individual republics saw their enterprises as being a symbol of ethnic pride - so you ended up with unprofitable businesses being kept artificially alive after the managers (who were appointed by the workers) overspent to keep the workers happy.

It's not a bad idea - but when we saw a variation of it in Poland (Solidarity managers controlling things such as Ciegelski) - the workers ruined it for themselves. But again - that was because the State supported them rather than simply saying "sorry, bye bye".

No pressure except the constitutional dictat that limits Poland's deficit to an absolute maximum of 60% GDP (with legal thresholds at 50 and 55%, at which intervention must be done or the government held accountable). This is why Tusk has set up this extraordinary vehicle using a state-owned bank (BGK) channelling revenue from state-owned institutions into state-backed loans. "Oh, but that's not government debt" declares PO. No-one's fooled by it, but that's how close to the brink Poland is with its borrowing; it needs to get that deficit dropping NOW or people at the top level start going to prison.


Of course not everything. But Poland certainly wouldn't be where it was without EU funds; it takes money to make money. And if there's no money to start with, then you can't make more.

I am curious as to what you mean by "Western media" though.

Lenka, these are naive comments, only all things Polish are great and successful:

Infrastructure does not come cheap. Right across Poland new roads and transport networks have been built with the help of billions of euros of European Union funds - known officially as cohesion or structural funds.

"Around 1% of our GDP growth since 2008 is because of EU money," said Poland's Regional Development Minister Elzbieta Bienkowska.
"That's almost 300,000 jobs. It's an enormous change, a kind of miracle I would say."

Cohesion funds are not designed to work alone. There has to be matching investment on a national level. In Poland the result is that GDP per capita has risen from just over 40% of the EU average when it joined the Union in 2004 to nearly 70% now.

"We would probably have made this progress in about 20 years if we had been forced to go it alone, without EU development money," Mrs Bienkowska said.

bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20318959

"What I say to my Polish colleagues," the UK's Europe Minister David Lidington told me on a recent visit to Warsaw,"is that all the money that is spent by the EU ultimately comes out of taxes paid by ordinary families in countries like Britain who are themselves under pretty big financial pressure."

It's actually quite a sensible idea - many of these institutions have incredible reserves (the State Forestry Service has around 2 billion in cash in the bank, for instance) that could and should be used elsewhere.

Here is a great website showing the motorways and the year in which they were built, it's not exactly the painting you lads have painted.

stadiony.klszarak.org/scc_a_s.swf

Also millions of Poles left, dropping the unemployment rate, billions of Euros sent over from abroad increasing wages for those who staid.

And we are talking about infrasturcture but there is a hell of a lot of money allocated to starting up business', playgrounds and people's environment.

Where I would disagree with you PennBoy, is that NOTHING that has improved in Poland after it joined the EU could have happened if it weren't for the Polish people themselves.

All you have to do is look at the other countries that joined at the same time and why they weren't able to come close to what Polish people have managed in a relatively short time.

It just goes to show, and I don't believe anyone is doubting, that Poland would have become a stronger country inevitably but with the whole E.U. thing it has happened quicker.

There are already mechanisms in place to move assets from one government agency to another; that's not the aim of this financial vehicle. The purpose of it is to disguise national debt so that state institutions can borrow without it showing up in the deficit, and therefore keeping it below the dreaded 60%. But considering all agencies, including the bank itself, are backed by the state, it means the state is the guarantor of the debt; it's liable in the case of a default. That makes it state debt, and while the lawmakers may turn a blind eye to it, the international market hasn't been fooled so easily.

It's clever, but not in a good way. Better would be, as others have said, to reduce the vast bureaucratic inefficiency the present government have built for themselves.

Western Media, I'll give you an example of what an impact in has made on people. German fans in Poland before the Euro 2012 Germany Greece said of the Greek team "they're wearing Jerseys paid for by our money" !


Increased the living standards of the recipients. The wages were increased because there were shortages of workers and they had no other choice.

Penn Boy, that's an indirect example (you're quoting Germans, not the media itself). Also, that's Germans talking about Greeks, not Western Media talking about Poles or the Polish economy.

I'm curious because I work in that industry, and we have to remove as much bias as possible. Sometimes that means being equally critical of both the EU and Poland, and other times equally praiseworthy.

A good story to look at would be the EU's approach to pollution and energy security. Poland receives subsidies to help it burn biomass instead of coal; this resulted in Polish power stations building biomass furnaces, sometimes importing waste material from South America to burn rather than domestic waste, in order to run profitably. But now Polish lawmakers want tariffs on imported biomass, which will make burning that fuel unprofitable. The increased cost will be passed on to the consumer.

So who do we blame for the rising costs? The EU for forcing "unsustainable" green targets on a coal-based economy? The energy companies for trying to "cheat" the system by burning cheap imported biomass instead of local stuff? Or the Polish lawmakers for crippling a profitable industry?

Witam!
Ironside: Get the official numbers right not those from British tabloids ;)
As to farmers (by the way check what the British family get and also the Grimaldy family ;)), since France (no.2 contributor) pays much more (the British "I want my money back" costs France several billions euros per year) than it receives, its farmers are not to feel guilty. Check official figures and you'll see that 1. France pays more than it receives, 2. British rebate costs a lot to others (mainly France and Italy) and 3. Poland receives MOST money in UE (no. 1 recipient) whereas pays close to nothing. If you refuse official figures, no way to make you understand.

As to GB, they just want money from UE (eg fo their rundown northern areas) but are anti-Europeans and they should be out. The UE should be limited to the 6 original members. GB started the **** in the community and now with the Euro and the enlargement to all those post communists "bras cassés", it's the end of it and it's high time that the whole thing blows up (just a matter of short time) and everybody shall be on their own, without depending upon others' subsidies.

No need to insult, I refer to official data and not to garbage found in anti portals.
Bonne journée quand même mais avec la haine que tu sembles avoir, ça ne semble pas très facile :)

True


I love the French language.

Hi Meathead!
I agree with you. My "problem" is that I just hate all those lower class cheap ESL "teachers" always between 2 cheap binge drinking and their Polish/Americans (since these 3 groups make at least 99% of PF) counterparts discussing what they have read in their cheap tabloids, Daily Mirror, the Sun or Fakt, Super Express or seen on Fox "News" et al. , which they take for granted instead of getting informed from official sources. It is unbelievable all the sh... to be read from them.

I have to say they are not the kind of Brits, Americans and Poles I mingle with (on a daily basis) ;) -
Have a good day! (mine will:))

I'm pretty sure they hate you too;) Especially when you make such silly statements.
The EU is about peace, partnership and free-trade. The EU will invest in countries and regions where it is needed. You may not believe in the EU and have a "so, let them eat cake" attitude, but I think most normal people would see the advantage of investment in Poland and our other friends in Europe.

that is the way it supposed to be - right/ I mean nobody forced France to agree to that! Also you leaving out all profits made by France but also by other European countries in Poland!

Good luck, I think that France should go her way and pronto! The way the original members are trying to rule others is just simply colonial, if not for those subsidies (rather inadequate) Poland would be better off outside the EU.

I'm consequently anti-EU because I know all those Europeans original members and their attitude in general! I think French are the worse! Nothing /i have seen since has made me to change my mind1

Anyway the Germans will not let you out!lol


I hate only bad as-holes and stupidity-good riddance to bad rubbish!

Everyone seems to hate everyone in the EU. Why then the EU leaders shouldn't hate one another at a eurosummit? But Meathead is setting quite a different standard on the PF:


I love the French language, me too


She said: Nevertheless, I wish you a good day, even if it seems quite difficult for me because of the hate you show.

But please don't tell me that you knew what it meant before I told you. I hate that!

So If the majority of Poles abroad return home and EU grants are seriously reduced? Titanic

What does titanic mean? Recession? Unemployment? Banks not lending? Have you not lived in the EU for the last 5 years?
They certainly aren't in the worst econmonic position, with or without EU funding.

Bull, Poland just joined the EU for money, they are no better than greedy mercenaries.

Bratwurst Boy
"Could Poland modernize and develop all on it's own? Maybe, maybe not....the majority of the Poles don't think so."

Could this be that they are all thick? (whole new meaning to the saying stupid Poles.) Or are they just a EU lapdog?
They also say that they should not be gratefull to the UK for helping them scince 2004, well why should we be gratefull
to them scince 1940? Poland makes out they did a great thing for the UK during the battle of Britain, 145 pilots thats
all they did.