Start-up Poland
Subtitle: the people who transformed an economy
By: Jan Cienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 251
ISBN-13: 9780226306810
Subjects: Post-communism; Entrepreneurship; Economic conditions; Businesspeople; History
Description: "Poland in the 1980s was filled with shuttered restaurants and shops that bore such imaginative names as 'bread,' 'shoes,' and 'milk products,' from which lines could stretch for days on the mere rumor there was something worth buying. But you'd be hard-pressed to recognize the same squares buzzing with bars and cafes today. In the years since the collapse of communism, Poland's GDP has almost tripled, making it the eight-largest economy in the European Union, with a wealth of well-educated and highly skilled workers and a buoyant private sector. Many consider it one of the only European countries to have truly weathered the financial crisis. As the Warsaw bureau chief for the Financial Times, Jan Cienski spent more than a decade talking with the people who did something that had never been done before: recreating a market economy out of a socialist one. Poland had always lagged behind wealthier Western Europe, and by the 1980s the gap had grown to its widest in centuries. But the corrupt Polish version of communism also created the conditions for the country's eventual revitalization, bringing forth a remarkably resilient and entrepreneurial people prepared to brave red tape and limited access to capital. In the 1990s, more than a million Polish people opened their own businesses, selling everything from bicycles to leather jackets, Japanese VCRs, and romance novels. The most business-savvy turned those primitive operations into complex corporations that now have global reach"--Dust jacket flap.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: From People's Poland to the Third Republic; title: In the starting blocks; title: Shocked by therapy; title: The survivors; title: Oligarchs?; title: White socks and dark suits : the Polish quest for luxury; title: The Red Press baron; title: On the move; title: A question of scale; title: Crushed by capitalism or by the visible hand of the government?; title: New businesses; title: Halfway there.