Privatization in the United Kingdom and Poland: The Model and Its Transformation

Abstract

When the Solidarnosc trade union was born in 1980, Lech Walesa claimed that Poland could become a second Japan, and the GDP growth rates achieved in the last couple of years led some journalists to call Poland a European Tiger. However, in the meantime, i.e., in the late 1980s, the economies (and polities) of Central and Eastern Europe were beginning to look worryingly similar to those of South America. Later on, at the very beginning of the transition process, i.e., in 1989— 1990, it became quite fashionable to compare Poland with Spain: the sizes of the two countries are more or less equal, and so were the levels of their economic development and the structure of their economies in the 1960s. What is very important, both of them had to overcome the inheritance left by authoritarian regimes, which meant that economic modernization was accompanied by transformations of their political systems. Consistently, however, it was other countries in Central and Eastern Europe in general, and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and Hungary in particular, that were the main reference points for any assessment of the economic and political changes in Poland.