Understanding Reform: The Case of Poland

This report reviews the reform process in Poland in the period 1989-2001, from the formation of the first non-Communist government to the defeat of right-wing forces in the 2001 parliamentary elections and the formation of a governing left-wing coalition of social democrats and the peasants’ party (both of them with roots in the Communist era). It reconstructs the sequence of reforms, assesses their relative successes, and focuses on the problem of the stagnation of the reform process at the end of the 1990s.