– The Polish deal brings us closer to the point where we can say that the Poles are living on the same economic level and in the same industrial environment as the inhabitants of the old European Union countries – Infrastructure Minister Andrzej Adamzyk said on Saturday. He appeared at a press conference in Tarnow.
The minister declared that the implementation of this program is something that “will bring us and our future generations into the twenty-first century, but this era was dreamed of by our fathers and grandfathers, because they dreamed that we would live at a level compatible with, for example, the old European Union countries.”
The same theses were presented in Płock by the Deputy Minister of State Assets, Maciej Małecki. He even gave an exact date, albeit a very distant one.
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We want the standard of living in Poland to increase dramatically again within 10 years. We rely on that and we have a good chance that after that time the profits in Poland will be at the level of countries like Spain, Italy and Portugal – Małecki said.
Małecki’s assumptions are a little less optimistic than Adamczyk. Spain and Portugal belong to the so-called countries of the South, slightly poorer than Germany or France.
The assumptions of Law and Justice party politicians may refer to different issues – for example, income or family income. These are the most comparative indicators. Let’s take a look at the earnings.
When it comes to average earnings in the European Union, Eurostat has data for 2019. During this period, the average citizen in society received a net income of € 17,325 per year. Pole – 7,124 euros. So our annual salary was 41 percent. European average. Compared to the Germans, we get more than 23.5 thousand euros per hand, and we’re worse – we get 30 percent. Their earnings.
Interestingly, the assumption to catch up with Spain – albeit in terms of indeterminate criteria – is not new. It was coined two years ago by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who then claimed that in 10 or 12 years we would catch up with the Spaniards.
Our economy is able to catch up with the European Union average in terms of GDP per capita within 14 years. Kaczynski said that within 21 years, Poland will reach the level of Germany. These theses were repeated after him also in 2019 by Matthews Murawiecki – that was before the parliamentary elections.
Morawiecki also incorporated similar assumptions into his Responsible Development Strategy – that is, in his previous development plan. “The most important assumed result will be an increase in average household income to 76-80% of the average European Union by 2020, and by 2030, rounding off to the average of the European Union, while striving to reduce income inequalities between individual regions” – SRD reads from 2017.
Was it possible? The average household income in the European Union (including the United Kingdom) in 2019 (the latest data available from Eurostat) was 17,858 euros. In Poland, it was 7,142 euros. There was still a lot to do with the assumed target – the average Polish household is 40 percent of what its EU counterpart as a whole earns.
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