Posted by IDQWE001 > 2023-03-21 17:01 | Report Abuse

Maciej Grabski looks out over a panoramic view of the Baltic Sea, from the 32nd floor of the Olivia Star tower in Gdańsk, Poland. “My children never saw the dark, devastated atmosphere that I remember from the 1980s,” he says. “Many people take things for granted now.” The tower, built by Grabski’s construction company, is the centrepiece of a new business development on the outskirts of Gdańsk, and filled with the offices of multinational companies. It is next door to the squat, concrete Olivia sports hall, where the Solidarity trade union movement held its first congress in 1981, heralding the beginning of the end for communism in the region. The economic demands of Solidarity, which had sprung up at the huge Gdańsk shipyard and was led by Lech Wałęsa, rippled through Poland and then the rest of central and eastern Europe during the 1980s. By the end of the decade, borders were open, regimes collapsed and the Berlin Wall, concrete symbol of 45 years of European division, was being pulled down. What happened next was extraordinary, painful and unpredictable, as an entire region lurched into uncharted territory. Progress was fitful, messy and often unevenly distributed, sowing the seeds in some countries for the recent rise of populism. But 30 years on from the heady days of autumn 1989, a range of metrics demonstrate that the transition from communism to capitalism has been a remarkable success. Central and eastern Europe over the past 30 years has witnessed one of the most dramatic economic spurts of growth that any region of the world has ever experienced. People live longer, healthier lives. Air quality is better, and individuals are on average twice as wealthy. “This is the golden age for the region,” says Marcin Piatkowski, a Polish economist who recently authored a book called Europe’s Growth Champion, about the meteoric rise of Poland’s economy over the past three decades. “The whole region has been successful, as reflected in the fact that on average, no Bulgarian, or Romanian or Pole has ever lived better than they do now, both in absolute terms and in relative terms compared to the west.” Such optimism often feels misplaced, given that many people in the region still feel left behind. But the statistics show that since 1990, the Polish and Slovak economies have grown more than sevenfold, and those of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and the Czech Republic more than fivefold. Life under capitalism Fifteen years after the transition, Poland and seven other former communist east European countries joined the EU. With much of eastern Europe becoming part of the single market, it could be integrated into western European supply chains. For smaller businesses, it also meant operating in an improved institutional setting and convergence with EU standards. “Joining the EU was the key moment, not because of subsidies, but because of frameworks: anti-monopoly rules, environmental protection and so on,” says Grabski.