Europe's Growth Champion : Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland

What makes countries rich? What makes countries poor? Europe's Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland seeks to answer these questions, and many more, through a study of one of the biggest, and least heard about, economic success stories. Over the last thirty years Poland has transitioned from a perennially backward, poor, and peripheral country to unexpectedly join the ranks of the world's high-income countries.Europe's Growth Champion is about the lessons learned from Poland's remarkable experience, the conditions that keep countries poor, and the challenges that countries need to face in order to grow.It defines a new growth model that Poland and its Eastern European peers need to adopt in order to continue to grow and catch up with their Western counterparts. Europe's Growth Champion emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth- institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders- in economic development.It argues that a shift from an extractive society,