State Capitalism in Poland

Abstract

The task of this paper is to study the growing state interventionism in Poland using the state capitalism approach. In particular, we try to refine the state capitalism concept in order to make it more applicable for studying transition economies, and with the help of this to analyse state capitalism manifestations in Poland. State capitalism in the broad and the narrow sense are defined, as well as six major manifestations of state capitalism in transition economies. Using this framework, we study the history of state capitalism formation and its present state in Poland, including specific features of Polish state capitalism, e.g. the importance of political capitalism and the use of SOEs as the source of rents, as well as the varieties of the state control over the enterprise sector. We draw special attention to the role of the state in the enterprise sector in state capitalism formation. The paper contributes to studies in state capitalism, in particular in transition economies, although several unanswered question still remain, such as whether the statist turn in Poland and several other transition countries is the system change, what are the roots of state capitalism, what is the impact of state capitalism on the ability of the governments to meet the social and economic development goals, etc.