According to the Poland’s official promotional website ‘Polska.pl’, the country has not been affected by the economic downturn and has been rising in global economic and investment rankings. The same is true about its national brand, which for the second time in a row has been ranked 20th, an excellent result, in the prestigious Bank Finance 2013 survey, outranking Austria and Belgium and being placed far ahead of other Central and Eastern European countries. More precisely, Polish national brand saw a 75-percent increase in value. The reason, according to the report’s authors, was that Poland was the only country in Europe to have resisted the effects of the economic downturn.
“Our economy’s resistance to the crisis is indeed an incentive for foreign investors. However, it is not the main reason why Poland has moved up in the rankings of business attractiveness. Poland is a clear leader in the region in terms of the number of jobs created by foreign investors,” Pawe? Tynel, Tax Manager at EY (formerly Ernst & Young) told poland.gov.pl. In a report published by EY “European Attractiveness Survey 2013,” Poland came out as a clear leader in Europe and the region. It ranked first in Central and Eastern Europe in terms of investment attractiveness and became a leader among the countries that attracted the greatest number of investment projects in 2012. Poland ranks third in Europe in terms of the number of jobs created by foreign investments.
Pawe? Tynel stresses that over 100,000 people in Poland are employed in shared services centres offering such services as: accounting, IT, payroll, human resources, etc. Poland has over 400 such service centres.
“The significant scale of this business attracts new investors, so we are witnessing a snowball effect which makes our position as a European leader even stronger,” says Tynel. “The second element of our investment attractiveness is the manufacturing sector, but here competition between the countries of the region is balanced. Still we have a relatively strong position in the automobile, chemical and aviation industries.
Poland also fared very well in a World Investment Report, an important ranking prepared by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). In the UNCTAD annual questionnaire, in which investors are asked about the most attractive countries in terms of investment in the years 2013-2015, Polska ranked fourth in Europe and 14th in the world. The report’s authors underscore that Poland managed to avoid the most painful effects of the economic crisis.
Poland’s economic performance, in addition to its attractiveness for investors was also surveyed. According to a 2013 report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), Poland ranked 23rd among the world’s biggest economies, with a GDP of USD 514 billion. CEBR forecasts that by 2023, Poland will be among the world’s twenty biggest economies because until that time “Poland’s steady economic development and improving living conditions will raise its GDP per capita to Western European levels.”
Poland scored somewhat lower in reports analysing a country’s business environment. In the world’s competitiveness ranking “World Economic Forum,” a document that is highly appreciated by foreign investors, Poland ranked 42nd in 2013. In turn, in the World Bank “Doing Business 2014” ranking, Poland ranked 45th among the 185 countries surveyed. Poland came ahead of Spain, the Czech Republic or Luxembourg, jumping up as many as 10 places, being its best result ever and also a promotion to the position of a leader in Central and Eastern Europe.
“We owe this success mainly to reforms that have streamlined the work of registry courts and shortened the procedures for obtaining building permits,” says Agnieszka Skala, the COE of Innovation Nest. ”Since 2005 our country has carried out as many as 22 reforms relating to doing business, thanks to which it got the recognition it deserved from the World Bank.