Book Review: Tadeusz Kowalik, www.polska transformacja.pl. Warszawa: Warszawskie Wydawnictwo Literackie MUZA: 2009: 278: ISBN 9788374957212.

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In one of his last published books1, the late Professor Tadeusz Kowalik made effort to assess the post-1989 transformation of Polish economy. Th is book is special, because its author takes, on the basis of his own personal experiences, a very critical stand towards the neo-liberal reforms introduced by Leszek Balcerowicz. The main thesis of the book is that the ‘shock-therapy’ administered by Balcerowicz and his accolades was not only unnecessary but in fact harmed the Polish society who has been paying the price of those reforms up to this day, the clear evidence of which is, for example, a huge extent of social exclusion and high portion of citizens living in poverty. The author was always sensitive to social injustice, and a reader can easily see his attitude emanating from the pages of the book. Kowalik never really came to terms with the choices made by political elites of Poland in the early 1990s and their long-lasting consequences. In his view, the key decisions were taken back then by a narrow, powerful circle without true social consultation. Th e decision-makers unilaterally imposed their point of view and the manner in which the reforms were implemented. In Kowalik’s opinion some of the reforms could have been introduced in a diff erent way and at a diff erent pace, for instance, the state should not have hurried so much with liberalization and privatization. Kowalik claims that the major political error committed at the time came from a naïve assumption that there were only two possible paths of development: socialism or market economy, while, in fact, there were numerous alternative scenarios available, presented by Janos Kornai in his prominent book ‘The Way to Free Economy’ or in a textbook ‘From Marx to market’ by Polish expatriate economists Włodzimierz Brus of Oxford and Kazimierz Łaski of Linz. (fragment of text)

Keywords

EN

the post-1989 transformation; economics; Poland; economic sociology; Central and Eastern Europe

• Publisher: Szkoła Główna Handlowa w Warszawie
• Journal: Warsaw Forum of Economic Sociology
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 179-183

Contributors

reviewer

Książkiewicz Izabella

• Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of Socio-Economics