ABSTRACT
This study has established some initial environmental aid project evidence that imitation from Western technology can now be effected more rapidly and more efficiently than under the Soviet-type conditions that previously existed in Poland. This improvement, is to a major extent, the effect of changing institutions-the ‘rules of the game’—since they now imply decentralised investment decisions. As the overwhelming part of technology transfers as aid is ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’, the environmental effects are therefore limited (much more than the taxpayers of the member nation of the OECD probably think), and, to judge from the first assistance projects to Poland, there is hardly any indigenous spread of environmental aid technologies after they have been introduced in a country.
