Réforme économique et politique anti-inflationniste en Pologne

In: Revue d'études comparatives est-ouest: RECEO, Band 21, Heft 2, S. 5-28

Abstract

Economie reform and basic issues of anti-inflationary policy in Poland
All countries of Eastern Europe suffer from more or less serious economic disequilibria. Recently, however, a new and especially disturbing fact has captured the attention of economists : those countries of the region which have experimented with market-oriented reforms have fallen prey to inflation, coupled with persistent disequilibria as they tried to check the rise of prices by preserving the remnants of price control. The really disquieting fact is that inflation tends to accelerate despite all efforts to stop it. Inflation has thus become the main economic problem in that part of the world. It threatens to undermine the attempted reforms and to revese the prevailing trend toward a more productive economy and a more liberal society.
Poland is a particularly vivid illustration of the difficulties of transforming a system based upon the monopoly of political power and bureaucratic control of the economy into a democracy with a freely operating market. Over the past two years, the problem became particularly acute as inflation clearly entered the phase usually described as galloping inflation, threatening to degenerate into hyperinflation. The critical turning point seems to have been the failed « price and income operation » (February 1988). The present article is an attempt at clarification of the interrelationship between reform and inflation in the light of the Polish experience.