A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour, with its citizens earning a tenth of West German wages. Today, its economy has edged past Switzerland to become the world’s 20th largest, boasting over $1 trillion in annual output.
This represents a historic leap from the post-Communist ruins of 1989-90 to today’s European growth champion. Economists suggest it offers crucial lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people, and the Trump administration has advocated for Poland’s presence to be recognised at an upcoming summit of the Group of 20 leading economies.
This transformation is reflected in people like Joanna Kowalska, an engineer from Poznan, a city of half a million people midway between Berlin and Warsaw. She returned home after five years in the United States.
“I get asked often if I’m missing something by coming back to Poland, and, to be honest, I feel it’s the other way around,” Ms Kowalska said. “We are ahead of the United States in so many areas.”
Ms Kowalska now works at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, which is developing Poland’s first artificial intelligence factory and integrating it with a quantum computer – one of ten across the continent financed by a European Union programme.
Kowalska worked for Microsoft in the U.S. after graduating from the Poznan University of Technology in a job she saw as a “dream come true.”
But she missed having a “sense of mission,” she said.
“Especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, the technology started developing so rapidly in Poland,” Kowalska added. “So it was very tempting to come back.”
The guest invitation to the G20 summit is mostly symbolic; no guest country has been promoted to full member since the original G20 met at the finance minister level in 1999, and that would take a consensus decision of all the members. Moreover, the original countries were chosen not just by GDP rank, but by their “systemic significance” in the global economy.
But the gesture reflects a statistical truth: In 35 years — a little less than one person’s working lifetime — Poland’s per capita gross domestic product rose to $55,340 in 2025, or 85% of the EU average. That’s up from $6,730 in 1990, or 38% of the EU average and now roughly equal to Japan’s $52,039, according to International Monetary Fund figures measured in today’s dollars and adjusted for Poland’s lower cost of living.
Poland’s economy has grown an average 3.8% a year since joining the EU in 2004, easily beating the European average of 1.8%.
It wasn’t simply one factor that helped Poland break out of the poverty trap, says Marcin Piątkowski of Warsaw’s Kozminski University and author of a book on the country’s economic rise.
One of the most important factors was rapidly building a strong institutional framework for business, he said. That included independent courts, an anti-monopoly agency to ensure fair competition, and strong regulation to keep troubled banks from choking off credit.
As a result, the economy wasn’t hijacked by corrupt practices and oligarchs, as happened elsewhere in the post-Communist world.
