ZPP Newsletter
Warsaw, 27th November 2019
Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers presents 5 challenges for
Poland and the new government
Public services are currently the biggest challenges for Poland. Healthcare, education, energy transformation, environmental protection and infrastructure – these are the areas which, according to the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers, are key from the point of view of further development of Poland. The organisation’s experts prepared a 250-page-long report discussing each of them separately.
There can be no doubt that, after the last four years, one could say Poles are much more well off than before. Economic indicators speak for themselves: salaries have increased along with the GDP, and the standard of living of many people has improved significantly. It seems that having achieved this short-term goal, the time has now come to face much more serious challenges. In addition to regulatory changes in the legal environment for business operations, the judicial system and other areas critical for the economy, a number of state policies must be addressed, often associated with public services, the quality of which still leaves much to be desired, and to which we must make significant adjustments to advance as a civilisation.
“The choice of these areas is quite obvious. Besides, Law and Justice had once defined them at one of the Congresses in Katowice,” states Cezary Kaźmierczak, President of the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers. “Healthcare is in a permanent crisis, and it might get even worse, because we are getting older. Environmental protection is a topic that is very high on the list of EU policy priorities, yet we still do not have a coherent approach to this issue. The energy transformation that we have to accomplish over the next decades is also directly related to it. In the face of changing geopolitical parameters, large infrastructure investments are becoming of key importance. And to finish with, we need a well-educated society to implement all our ambitious plans.”
The report published today is in fact a package of five documents that are the result of many months of hard work of the Union’s experts and consultations with selected external specialists. Each part of the publication contains a diagnosis of the current state of affairs and key recommendations for the future together with a justification. According to the Union’s experts, their implementation may influence the developmental pace of Poland. The thematic scope of the report is, of course, very wide and covers issues from waste management, through the structure of the healthcare market, to the manner educational institutions are managed.
“In all of the analysed areas, we can distinguish some special challenges that we will have to face over the next few years,” notes Jakub Bińkowski, the Union’s director of the Department of Law and Legislation. “We are talking about demographic problems affecting the situation in the healthcare system or the transformation of the economy into a knowledge-based model, forcing changes in the education system or, finally, the implementation of EU environmental and energy policies. All these issues are real phenomena that we will have to face.”
According to the experts of the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers, the time for the implementation of subsequent social programs has already ended, and the priority for the coming years should be to begin facing the long-term key challenges ahead of Poland.
“One can thinks of this report as a set of strategic assumptions for the state in areas that we believe are an absolutely priority,” concludes Cezary Kaźmierczak. “We worked on it for a long time and consulted with industry experts, because we did not want this report to be considered a collection of our wishful thinking. All the recommendations it contains are realistic and possible to implement.”
Download the report: 27.11.2019 Report by the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers: 5 challenges for Poland
