Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

6d6b73

It turns out it's not that hard to grow an economy once countries all around you stop trying to kill your culture, exterminate your population and steal your lands.

helge9210

Vacuuming working age population from Ukraine since 2014. Poland did everything right, while Ukrainian governments and businesses were smirking "What are you going to do?" during salary discussions.

kingstoned

They have had good public education for the past decade or two and rank high in international student rankings. So, I would bet that high 'human capital' would be the cause here.

mdre

And yet it's still not all roses in the actual everyday life given that we have higher prices than Germany (food, phones, computers) while earning 3x less. But it surely beats how we had it the 90s.

seidleroni

Noah Smith had a good article about this in 2024 for those interested in reading more: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/six-ideas-for-poland

choeger

It certainly helps to be neighbor with an economically strong but demographically weak and overly beaurocratic country that hungers for eager, competent workers.

mothballed

They're scared shirtless of communism and statism, have recent enough memory of why, and went full sail on classical liberal economics. It worked.

dzonga

before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work. after Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK

juho_

It's the Zabka economy.

moi2388

- Educated population - Access to the EU market - Cheap labour - 250 billion in EU subsidies

retinaros

french and german working class tax. and obviously great leadership to use EU and that money well to win. unlike france for instance that got outplayed by germany that itself got outplayed by their dear ally the USA and are now going into energy obsolescence.

danr4

Poland would've probably been my top relocation priority if it weren't for the atrocious air quality

ptdorf

Educated AND motivated workforce will do the trick. All the polish I know that work in IT enjoy handwork as well. They are hard workers.

baal80spam

Nit, but I don't think we're there anymore. We were there briefly around March, when this article was posted.

mrits

They are trained for high earning jobs while willing to take a lot less. That has to help. Ukraine was on the same path.

mlitwiniuk

Filed from Poznań, which is where I'm typing from. The dateline alone made me smile. I've been building software here for almost 20 years. Started a software house, grew it to ~50 people, sold it, now back to bootstrapping from scratch. The fact that this is a normal sentence to type from a Polish city is, honestly, kind of the whole story. That "institutional framework" line in the article is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having run companies through Polish bureaucracy — it's fine. It works. A generation ago that bar was on the floor. Boring is a feature. Politics aside, the 35-year arc has been quietly extraordinary. European to the bone, with old roots and a real appetite for what's next.

comrade1234

I spent some time in Poland for work about 10 years ago. I remember the cities being very expensive and chic - on par with Paris, Berlin, etc but when you got out of the cities (my project was in Bydgoszcz) it's a completely different world - poor, rundown, etc. would be curious how it is now and also where most of the Ukrainian refugees settled.

tanepiper

7 years ago we got a Polish Hunting Spaniel, and did our first trip to Poland. Since then we've been back several times, and each time you really see the different - new and upgraded road, city buildings being renovated into new housing and commercial areas - also noticed the costs going up too. But also you start to notice that definitely a lot of people who left Poland are coming back, and with that skills and new economic opportunities.

croes

Related? https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...