Poland
The COVID-19 crisis has exposed long-standing issues in the health care sector, including the vulnerability of the population to respiratory illnesses linked to high air pollution. The main medium-term challenges are linked to the shortages of skilled workers and prevalence of micro and smaller firms with low productivity and weak connections to local, national and international markets. Addressing such challenges is key for digital and green transitions and ensuring their inclusiveness.
Economy: Percentage gap with respect to the population-weighted average of the highest 18 OECD countries in terms of GDP per capita (in constant 2015 PPPs).
Inequality: The Gini coefficient for disposable income measures the extent to which the distribution of disposable income among households deviates from perfect equal distribution. A value of zero represents perfect equality and a value of 100 extreme inequality.
Environment: Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions include emissions or removals from land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). A high exposure to air pollution refers to above 10 μg/m3 of PM2.5.
Source: Economy: OECD, National Accounts, Productivity and Labour Force Statistics Databases; Inequality: OECD, Income Distribution Database and World Bank, World Development Indicators Database; Environment: OECD, Environment Database and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Database.
Skills and productivity growth will be key in facing future challenges
The pandemic has put the healthcare system under heavy strain. Spending on healthcare and long-term care has been relatively low over the past decades (Panel A) and together with the high prevalence of risky behaviours has led to weak health outcomes. Strengthening primary care, long-term and social care and prevention campaigns would avoid costly hospitalisations, improve the referral system and reduce waiting lists.
Shortages of skilled labour were already a key impediment to growth before the crisis and are likely to hinder digitalisation and greening of the economy where new skills will be needed. To facilitate labour reallocation toward new technologies while at the same time avoiding the scarring effects of the pandemic, education and training need to be strengthened. The adoption of individual training accounts, making training rights portable from job to job, would promote lifelong learning, particularly among the unemployed and workers on temporary contracts who are more likely to be low-skilled and disengaged from learning. This would also help increase the employment rate of older workers by improving their working opportunities, notably those at greater risk of being displaced in carbon-intensive regions and industries. To boost the quality and availability of training programmes, multi-annual co-financing schemes should be dedicated to developing workplace-based vocational training programmes, adapted to local labour market needs. The new system to certify training providers should be evaluated and expanded, along with the publicly-available database providing information about training opportunities.
The general availability of skills needs to be enhanced through greater labour market participation of women and older workers. To this end, continuing to improve access to childcare, adapting it to the working hours, and developing long-term capacities would encourage less-qualified parents to return to work and improve the opportunities for children of lower-educated parents to develop skills in the future. In the medium-term, harmonising employment protection for all age groups would avoid disincentives to hiring older workers, who are currently better protected.
Air pollution, largely explained by the use of poor quality coal and biomass in the housing sector (Panel B), contributes to the poor health outcomes. Government support for energy efficiency and renewable energy, as well as investment in modernising electricity grids and district heating networks, would help reduce emissions and could be an effective stimulus for the recovery. Tightening regulations on energy consumption in buildings and deploying tax incentives, subsidies and awareness campaigns would put the economy on a path to reduce the high level of greenhouse gas emissions.
Burdensome and non-transparent administrative and regulatory procedures risk hindering private investment and the reallocation of capital and skills – key requirements for a swift, job-rich recovery but also to face future shocks and adapt to a low-carbon economy, facilitating the reallocation of stranded assets. With the recovery underway, streamlining court proceedings, and in particular bankruptcy procedures, would facilitate contract and payment enforcement as well as help to face the potential increase in insolvencies resulting from the pandemic. At the same time, setting up a new firm faces too many regulatory requirements and some services professions, such as lawyers and notaries, still face relatively high barriers to entry.