Budget System in Poland: Challenges and Ongoing Reforms

Bartłomiej Wiczewski

No 60, European Economy - Economic Briefs from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission

Abstract: In recent years, amid solid economic growth and measures to increase tax collection, Poland significantly reduced its fiscal deficit and public debt. Simultaneously, the country implemented several policies that are likely to weigh on public finances in the future. In the medium and long term, Poland will face challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and high expenditure related to population ageing, switching its growth engine to more knowledge-based activities and tackling climate challenges. Given recent increases in tax collection, procyclicality of tax revenue and the recession caused by the pandemic, achieving further collection gains does not appear plausible. Thus, an efficient management of public expenditure is expected to be crucial for fiscal policy. The budget system plays a major role in this. The current budget system in Poland has not undergone a major reform for years. Its current setup may not always be conducive to an effective management and control of funds. Longer-term planning is not sufficient and value-adding tools, like spending reviews, are not an inherent part of the process. Also, external, independent oversight is not optimal. The authorities, recognising the scale of these issues, are reforming the budget system. They benefit from a technical support financed by the EU under the Structural Reform Support Programme. As the reform will involve nearly all general government units and entail a significant change of working methods, it needs to be spread over several years.

Keywords: budget system; budget; reform; spending reviews; performance budgeting; public finances; budget system in Poland: challenges and ongoing reforms; Wiczewski. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H61 H68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/publications/ ... d-ongoing-reforms_en (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:euf:ecobri:060

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in European Economy - Economic Briefs from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECFIN INFO ().