Is Poland’s “economic miracle” for real?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Poland’s economy is expected to be the fastest-growing in Europe this year according to the European Union, with the spending power of its average worker on course to overtake that of Japan.
So how, three and a half decades after the fall of communism, has it become a case study of capitalism?
We hear from some of the country's biggest companies on that increased consumer power, their ambitions to take on the world with international expansion, and ask what hurdles lie in the way for what one economist calls "Europe's growth champion."
If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presented and produced by Will Bain
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, why bond markets are so powerful, China's property bubble, and Gen Z's experience of the current job market.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include Google's Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and the CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol.
(Picture: An aerial view of Warsaw, Poland, including modern skyscrapers. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.7 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Will Bain. |
| 0:12.9 | Poland's economy is booming. |
| 0:15.6 | So within the span of 35 years, it has moved from being poorer than Jamaica to being richer than Japan. |
| 0:22.2 | So today, we're joining the businesses, powering one of Europe's fastest growing economies, |
| 0:27.1 | and hearing how it's changing perceptions. |
| 0:29.7 | We have a generation, I would say, of young Poles, and they are no longer physical workers. |
| 0:35.7 | They are knowledge workers, middle careers, executives. |
| 0:39.5 | So today on Business Daily, we're asking, is Poland's so-called economic miracle for real? |
| 0:47.6 | It's very visible. You can actually feel it physically. When I went to school in the early 90s, you wouldn't imagine the roads, |
| 0:57.5 | the cars, the infrastructure we have. It was post-socialists. Nothing worked. We had brown water |
| 1:03.7 | in taps. So that was the level we started from. Now I feel there's no difference between Polish cities and, |
| 1:12.0 | I don't know, French or German cities. In terms of physical evidence of what's happening, |
| 1:17.7 | businessman Matthias Chachic is one of many we'll hear from today who can scarcely believe the |
| 1:23.0 | changes in his country. For Mikhail Pierskowski, one of Poland's leading economists, where and how that |
| 1:29.5 | transformation starts, is clear. |
| 1:31.9 | No, the beginning of the story is 1989, where Poles rose up against communism and created |
| 1:39.0 | the first semi-democratic government, and then immediately after the first democratic government. |
| 1:46.2 | Well, here's how we reported the run-up to those first elections in Poland in 1989. |
| 1:51.7 | Music from a Solidarity Street rally in the western Polish city of Poznan. |
| 1:56.1 | This time last year, such a demonstration might have been broken up by the police. |
| 2:00.4 | Now they're on hand only to |
... |
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