Assessing the state of public finances in Poland: myths and reality

The assessment of public finances in Poland at the dawn of the 21st century is fairly unanimous and unequivocal. These finances are said to be in a deep crisis, with this term being regarded as too mild, and therefore often replaced with stronger ones: collapse, crash, collapse. Such opinions are presented by analysts, columnists and politicians, both of the opposition and ruling parties. Similar assessments are made, perhaps not so dramatically, of public finances in some other countries, e.g. Germany and France, which are even threatened with sanctions in the European Union for excessive (above 3% of GDP) budget deficits. Let us therefore try to define the essence of the public finance crisis. Taking as a starting point the tasks (functions) that these finances can and should perform, the essence of the crisis boils down to the fact that the institutions and instruments of public finance are insufficiently used for efficient redistribution and allocation of public funds and in fiscal policy (stabilisation function). The most objectionable aspect of this is usually the implementation of the redistributive tasks of public finances. This redistribution refers to the secondary distribution of income that was previously distributed by market mechanisms. The most important scopes of the redistributive function of public finances include the distribution of resources between rich regions of the country and poor ones, the distribution of resources between wealthy and poor strata and groups of the population, the intergenerational distribution of resources. With today’s rate of redistribution of GDP by public finances in our country, many urgent needs in the field of development of human capital, social capital, material infrastructure are inadequately or even completely unmet. In this, one can indeed see the crisis of public finances.