ABSTRACT
Jeffrey Sachs’ recommendation of a once-for-all shock therapy in order to get rid of the traditional economic imbalances of the more or less reformed planned economies seems to receive wide acceptance. The “shortage economy” theorizing and the material persistence of all sorts of shortages have accustomed to regarding planned economies as working in a regime of over-full utilization of capacity. The Polish economy arrived at the threshold of the deflationary measures with the legacy of capacity underutilization, due to the systemic tendency to build up hidden reserves, to the sluggishness of the recovery from the 1980–1982 collapse, and to the 1989 conjunctural slowdown. Foreign capital involvement may be thought to help solving - or rather eluding - the problem of establishing Polish manufactures on foreign markets by the transfer of foreign production lines to Poland; thus the manufactured products would already have an international market.
