How fast is Poland catching up with the European Union countries in terms of social development? In your report “Social development in Poland compared to the European Union countries – Catch-up Index (2024 edition)” you defined seven areas. Where are we closer and where are we still far away? For example, we have the feeling that we are quickly catching up in terms of income.
For the third time, we presented the Catch-up indicator, which refers to this issue. Joining the European Union, integration, were related to the fact that we had aspirations to catch up with the quality and living conditions of Western Europe. Three years ago, we thought it would be good to see what it looks like. Together with researchers from the Warsaw School of Economics, we defined seven areas for this purpose. These were: income and material deprivation, labor market, education, health, housing, transport, environmental protection. By comparing indicators in different countries, we check what the situation looks like.
Indeed, in the first of the mentioned areas we are doing very well. It must be remembered that in income it is not only how much we earn, for example in euros, that counts, but also the level of purchasing power. And here our indicators are very good, both in relation to the 14 countries, i.e. those that were in the European Union before us, and the 13 that joined together with us or later. This is the only area where we are actually overtaking the countries of the old and new Union (the indicator is measured every year and reflects such a change – ed.).
Where do we fall short the most?
In education – if we look at indicators that concern participation in education, adult lifelong learning, this is our Achilles heel. We also lag behind in terms of the number of patents, compared primarily to countries 14. Similarly, when it comes to the share of people working in research and development, we have a lot of catching up to do.
We have good results in terms of how many relatively young people, aged 30-34, have achieved higher education. In addition, relatively few people give up education early. We are also lacking a lot in terms of health.
To what extent have black swans, or unexpected crises and their broad consequences, affected our catching up with EU countries? Other countries have also had to cope with them.
The indicator is relative, so it refers to other countries. The coronavirus pandemic has affected us a bit more in the case of health. The indicator of continued healthy life has worsened, but we are already making up for it, after the pandemic we are slowly returning to normal. When it comes to education, the situation is different here. We do not include in our indicator a measure that is very important and worth mentioning in the context of the question, i.e. studies of 15-year-olds. These are the so-called PISA studies. Those published this year showed the situation after the pandemic. It is clear that everything has worsened. The pandemic, distance learning, have had a very strong impact on the level of youth results, as well as deepened the differentiation. In our case, the latter turned out to be even greater. Two things overlapped here. The second was the change in the education system – all researchers said that shortening general education from 9 to 8 years would not be a good change and indeed, the number of people who achieve the lowest results increased. This is a very big challenge for us to catch up with countries where there is a very strong emphasis on equalizing opportunities.
A shortened version of the interview conducted during the XXXIII Economic Forum in Karpacz. The entire interview can be viewed at forsal.pl
