Thanks to structural and political reasons, Poland has enjoyed a less severe recession than that experienced in other European states, according to Jacek Kotłowski from the Analytics Department at the National Bank of Poland (NBP).
Before the pandemic, the economy was enjoying robust growth while the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic accounted for only 2 percent of the nation’s economy.
The NBP’s analyst said that Poland had benefitted from “cheap and diversified export and the government and the central bank had learned the lessons of the last crisis. This time around we had the right fiscal response backed by the appropriate monetary policy.”
The specialist assessed that the fiscal response to the crisis with aid packages to maintain jobs and small businesses has been a success.
Kotłowski was responding to the publication of the World Bank’s “Global Economic Prospects 2021” report, which forecasts that growth in Central and Eastern Europe in 2021 will be limited to 3.3 percent as a result of the setback suffered during the second wave of the pandemic.
Central Europe itself is to do a little better, growing at 3.6 percent, mainly thanks to the opening up of retail and the freeing up of pandemic restrictions in the eurozone.
The World Bank expects that both Poland and Hungary will maintain their course of low interest rates (close to zero in Poland). Economists believe that the main risk to the economy is still the pandemic, which could result to another wave of restrictions which could hit the budgets of both families and businesses.
