ABSTRACT
According to Kornai and many other students of the subject, command and market economies are respectively supply-constrained and demand-constrained systems. A command economy is characterized by full employment of the factors of production, above all of the labor force, job security and an egalitarian distribution of income, and all these combined with rather low efficiency. On the other hand, high efficiency, job insecurity, and large income differentials, hand in hand with a rather high and persistent unemployment, characterize a market economy. Of course, the changes between 1980 and 1985 were provoked first of all by the deep political and economic crisis in Poland. This had led to an important and rather untypical absolute fall of labor productivity. If people consider, however, the period between 1950 and 1980 they note that the labor productivity in Poland was continuously falling, as compared with Spain, because its rate of growth was smaller.
