On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, F G wrote: > A brief search at www.firstgov.gov with "NAFTA Poland" seemed to turn up > nothing. Probably if the speech is old enough it wouldn't be archived > anyway (I'm not pretending to be thorough here).
I'm not quite sure, whether it was speech, or another form of document. > You might want to check www.doc.gov (U.S dept. of commerce) and > http://www.doc.gov/International_Trade/ or the library of congress at > www.loc.gov but otherwise I have no ideas. Thanks, I'll take a look. > BTW I'd be interested in hearing > more about Poland's political economy. I heard that the left parties wish > to return to industrial policy and hence abandon neoliberalism. S.c. "neoliberalism" is gone. The most liberal regulations were made - surprisingly - by communists, when they left government (for a while) in 1989. Since that time the economic freedom, which visited our country very shortly (1989-92), is still more and more restricted. In previous communists times (before 1989) the people were arguing for bureaucracy. Can you imagine, that today we have in our country almost 5x (yes - FIVE TIMES) more clerks (mainly at tax offices)? It's tied to our "direction" - to the EU... unfortunately. Can you imagine, that the total amount of the taxes in our country is more than two times higher, than in Poland 1939-45, under nazi occupation - at the time, when the german government was draining our country for their war-related needs? I'm afraid, you can't believe it - but (if you're or someone are interested), I can show it on the numbers. We've just one truly right party in our country - it's Unia Polityki Realnej (Union of Real Politics - http://www.upr.org.pl/). All the other parties, which are declaring themselves as "right", you can just take as "centre-oriented" (something like american Democrats) or "Christian Democrats"-like (usually with socialist economic programm). And today's government are the people well-known from the "good"-old times... just the communists, which are now "socialdemocrats". Names, which are easy to recognize from the past. The history has made a circle. pozdrawiam / regards Zbigniew Baniewski
