On a trip to Poland in 2003, I positively gushed over the nation’s prospects for the future. “Poland truly wants to get on,” I wrote in the Washington Post, “and that’s the first step to actually doing it.”
Aspiration, however, isn’t everything. Poland has certainly done well in the past eight years, but not as well as I had hoped. Currently, the economy is sputtering along with an unemployment rate of 13.1 percent – fourth-worst (after South Africa, Spain, and Greece) among the 43 countries surveyed by the Economist. Unlike its neighbors Hungary and the Czech Republic, not to mention the European continent as a whole, Poland is running a trade deficit, and its budget deficit (at 7.5 percent of GDP) isn’t a pretty picture either.
