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301. Poland: Industry Forecast

Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxford Economics
Abstract:
GDP is expected to rise by 2.6% in 2012 and expand by 2.7% in 2013. Over the next 10 years to 2021, GDP is predicted to grow on average by 3.2% a year. Manufacturing output growth is forecast to be higher than GDP growth over the next decade. Manufacturing output is expected to increase by 2.1% in 2012 and expand by 5.3% in 2013. Over the next 10 years to 2021, manufacturing output is expected to grow on average by 4.3% a year. As a result, the share of manufacturing output in GDP is projected to rise from 25.4% in 2011 to 27.2% by 2016 and increase to 28.7% by 2021. Over the same period, the share of service sector output in GDP is expected to decline from 58.5% in 2011 to 57.2% in 2016 and fall to 56.2% in 2021.
Topic:
Economics, Industrial Policy, International Trade and Finance, Markets, and Foreign Direct Investment
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland

302. US Presidents and Foreign Policy Mistakes

Author:
Özden Zeynep Oktav
Publication Date:
11-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
Socrates' pupil Chaerephon once asked an oracle “who is the wisest of all men?” The oracle responded that Socrates is the wisest of all because of his self-awareness. According to philosophers from Socrates to Montaigne, Spinoza, Kant, true wisdom and full knowledge may be a utopian fantasy. In a world of uncertainty where mistakes are unavoidable facts of daily life for citizens and politicians alike, how politicians will be able to avoid foreign policy mistakes is the main concern of this book. There are some other questions of crucial importance which the book deals with: What are foreign policy mistakes and how and why do they occur? The answers to those questions are available in this book and it concentrates on the concept of power. Regarding the concept of power, the main question is “kto-kovo?” (Lenin's famous question, “who controls whom?”) The answers to the question “what are foreign policy mistakes?” and conceptualizing foreign policy mistakes are quite blurry and complicated. There may be lots of different kinds of mistakes, such as violating moral rules, lack of cognitive judgment, and policies costing too much and having unanticipated and undesirable results. The mistakes can be classified as omission (too little/too late) and commission (too much/too soon). For example, mistakes of omission are evident in the British policies towards Germany which failed to deter Germany's occupation of Sudetenland in 1938 and to reassure the Russians that they would negotiate an alliance against Germany. This failure of the British decision makers led to a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler in 1939. The Katyn Forest massacre exemplifies best how Soviet Russia misperceived the gains in cooperating with Germany in the removal of Poland from the map of Europe because according to the authors, the Soviet decision to execute Polish POWs and bury them in the Katyn Forest is a foreign policy decision that falls into three domain; morality, intelligence and policy. It was a violation of international law, based on a diagnostic judgement blinded by ignorance of the future and by communist ideology, which led to a prescription for a policy action that alienated future allies.This, at the same time illustrates the mistake of commission (too much/too soon) and moral failure. Foreign policy choices are not only concerned with rational choices, but, as Axelrod and Jarwis clearly defined it, they also stem from some sources of mistakes such as subjective cognitive maps, heuristics, attribution errors, desires to maintain cognitive consistency and avoid cognitive dissonance, selective attention, and other emotional or cold cognitive biases. Khong explains why human beings are “creatures with limited cognitive capacities” by emphasizing that leaders, like every human, tend to turn to historical analogies for guidance when confronted with novel foreign policy challenges. However the issue is that the result is often a foreign policy mistake since this only helps the leaders “access analogies on the basis of surface similarities”.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Britain, Russia, United States, Europe, Poland, Soviet Union, and Germany

303. Aid allocation of the emerging Central and Eastern European donors

Author:
Balázs Szent-Iványi
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
In the past decade, a number of Central and Eastern European countries have emerged as new donors of foreign aid. Although these countries already had certain forms of development-related cooperation with Third World countries during the Cold War, the pre-1989 experiences are difficult to compare with their current, (re-)emerging aid policies. There is a clear pressure, related mostly to membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU), for these new donors to align themselves with the norms and principles of the international development aid regime. Many special characteristics are observable, however, in the Central and Eastern European donors, which predict that they will behave differently than the members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the 'club' of advanced donor countries. In part, this may be related to the fact that their foreign aid policies are still in their infancy, but it is also undeniable that their motivations for giving aid are somewhat different than those of the Western donors. It is logical to assume that the consequences of these different motivations are identifiable in the quality and allocation of aid provided by the emerging donors.
Topic:
Foreign Aid
Political Geography:
Europe, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia

304. Russia's foreign policy towards Poland: Seeking reconciliation? A social constructivist analysis

Author:
Valentina Feklyunina
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Russia's relations with Poland in the post-Soviet period have been greatly affected by their divergent historical narratives that have shaped their dominant identities and have been further promoted by the political elites to maintain these identities. However, Moscow's attempts to project a more positive image in Poland in recent years have involved re-articulating some elements of the official narrative. Drawing on social constructivism, this article presents a theoretical framework that can be applied to an analysis of Russia's foreign policy, and illustrates its benefits by examining Russia's policy towards Poland.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Russia, Poland, Soviet Union, and Moscow

305. Tableau de bord des pays d’Europe centrale et orientale et d’Eurasie 2012 (Volume 1 : Europe centrale et orientale)

Author:
Jean-Pierre Pagé, Jacques Rupnik, Céline Bayou, Edith Lhomel, and Catherine Samary
Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
Abstract:
L’Europe centrale et orientale ne se porte globalement pas aussi mal qu’on l’écrit parfois et, d’une certaine manière, nettement mieux que l’Europe occidentale et que la zone euro en particulier. Avant la crise déjà, elle se singularisait par une croissance élevée, qui atteignait 4 % par an en 2008 pour les dix nouveaux membres de l’Union européenne (UE), contre 0,5 % pour les quinze pays de la zone euro. Son taux de chômage était inférieur d’environ 6,5 % à celui constaté dans ladite zone. En outre, dûment chapitrée par les institutions financières internationales, elle pouvait faire état d’une discipline exemplaire en matière de finances publiques, avec une dette qui ne dépassait pas 30 % du PIB pour la grande majorité des seize pays étudiés ici (voir les tableaux synthétiques à la fin de ce chapitre) et était très inférieure à ce niveau pour plusieurs d’entre eux. Quant au déficit des finances publiques, calculé à partir de la moyenne des seize pays, il était inférieur à 3 % du PIB. A tout cela s’ajoute la bonne tenue d’ensemble d’un jeune système bancaire qui, pourtant dépendant de maisons mères occidentales ayant subi le choc de la crise, ne s’est pas effondré malgré les sinistres avertissements des Cassandres : les pays baltes ont bénéficié de liens très forts avec les riches systèmes bancaires de l’Europe du Nord, les pays de l’Europe centrale (à l’exception de la Slovénie) ont su constituer au cours de la transition des banques saines, et les établissements de l’Europe du Sud-Est ont été, au moins momentanément, sauvés par l’action conjuguée des institutions financières internationales dans le cadre des deux « Initiatives de Vienne ».
Topic:
Markets, Political Economy, Politics, Governance, Finance, and Regional Integration
Political Geography:
Eastern Europe, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Latvia, Montenegro, Czech Republic, Central Europe, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

306. Determinants of Household Demand for Services - Formal Versus Informal Sector

Author:
Izabela Marcinkowska
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
This paper addresses the issue of household demand for services in Poland when informal sector is taken into consideration. The aim of the study is threefold: (i) to investigate the factors influencing households expenses for services, (ii) to find the determinants of households’ tax strategy (choice between acquiring services on regular labour market or not), (iii) to investigate the differences between the factors that influence the expenses for formal versus informal services. Two-step Heckman selection model is used to account for the selection into buying household services. Lee’s (1983) procedure is adopted to control for the selection into the particular choice of tax strategy when purchasing household services. The decision whether to buy household services and whether formally or informally is modelled as a sequential choice and estimated by bivariate probit with selection. An important novel feature of the model used is the inclusion of variables that capture social norms and personal attitudes toward tax evasion. The study concludes that factors influencing expenses for services are positively related to financial situation of households, education and age of household head. The probability of avoiding taxes is higher for lower income households, households with more than one member and for those where a positive attitude toward informal employment is expressed. The impact of determinants of expenses for formal and informal services separately is comparable. Only household structure has the opposite effect on expenses for formal services versus informal ones.
Topic:
Employment, Social Policy, Labor Market, and Informal Economy
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland

307. Innovation Systems and Knowledge-Intensive Enterpreneurship: a Country Case Study of Poland

Author:
Elzbieta Wojnicka, Richard Woodward, and Wojciech Pander
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
This study surveys the current state of affairs in Poland with regard to the development of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship (KIE), or new firm creation in industries considered to be science-based or to use research and development (R&D) intensively. We place KIE in Poland in the larger institutional context, outlining the key features of the country’s National Innovation System, and then focus on KIE itself. Our findings are perhaps more optimistic than many previous studies of knowledge-based economy development in Poland. We observe significant progress due to Polish access to the European Union. The frequency with which universities are playing a significant role as partners for firms in the innovation process has increased significantly; moreover, we observe a significant degree of internationalization of innovation-related cooperation. Another optimistic development is that the level of activity of venture capitalists seems to be fairly high in Poland considering the relatively low degree of development of capital markets offering VC investors exit opportunities. Moreover, after almost two decades of decline in the share of R&D spending in GDP, there are signs that this is beginning to rise, and that businesses are beginning to spend more on R&D. While demand-side problems continue to be significant barriers for the development of KIE, due to the relatively low level of education and GDP per capita in the country, the trends here are optimistic, with high rates of economic growth and improvements in the level of education of younger generations. Significant improvement is still needed in the area of intellectual property protection.
Topic:
Development, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Knowledge Economy
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland

308. Health Status, Functional Limitations and Disability: Changes in Poland

Author:
Agnieszka Sowa-Kofta
Publication Date:
11-2012
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
The social changes in Poland over the last two decades have had an impact on many dimensions of life, including on important elements of human capital, such as health and functional and instrumental daily activities. This article contains an overview of the available data and indicators on health status, morbidity and disability. It presents the changes in the level of functional and legal disability and aims to show the reasons for these trends. Functional disability is highlighted as one of the major challenges for social and health policy in the next few decades in the context of dynamic aging.
Topic:
Health Care Policy, Social Policy, Disability, Public Health, and Labor Market
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland

309. Innovation Strategies and Productivity in the Polish Services Sector in the light of CIS 2008

Author:
Krzysztof Szczygielski and Wojciech Grabowski
Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
Industry - and firm-level research into both innovations and productivity has long been limited to manufacturing. With this paper, we aim to contribute to the stream of literature that aims at extending the scope of such investigations to the services industry. To this end we analyze the innovation strategies in several service sectors in Poland in 2008 and examine their relationship to productivity. Our results show that service firms differ considerably in their innovation strategies, but that most of those strategies lead to productivity gains.
Topic:
Development, Innovation, Private Sector, and Knowledge Economy
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland

310. Provision of Long Term Care for the Elderly in Poland in Comparison to Other European Countries

Author:
Izabela Styczynska
Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
In recent years, population ageing has attracted the attention of research and policy advisors in all European countries. Several policy actions have been directed toward ensuring optimal long-term care (LTC) for elderly people while maintaining fiscal rationality. LTC systems are very different across all European countries. Their design is characterized by diverse arrangements for the provision of care/organization and financing. Despite general concerns, the Polish LTC system is still at the bottom of the pile in terms of the organization and provision of care.
Topic:
Social Policy, Aging, Social Services, and Labor Market
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland