Foreign investors tout role in Poland's economy

Foreign investors have been key to Poland's economic expansion, a report said Thursday, released amid allegations by some rightwing politicians that Poles are being exploited by foreign capital. Inflows from abroad have boosted growth by more than 15 percent over 25 years, said the report, published by the Warsaw-based Polityka Insight think tank. Fourteen national chambers of commerce operating in Poland, including ones from top investors Germany, the US, Britain and France, participated in the report.
Foreign investors injected more than 712 billion zloty (166 billion euro, $175 billion) into Poland over the past 25 years resulting in "an average of 0.7 per cent" annual rise in GDP, the report said.
"Poland has attracted an average of 26 billion zloty per year", according to the report.
Companies from the US along with Poland's EU partners Germany and France topped the list of investors. "Thanks to them there will be 16,000 new job openings. Foreign companies reinvested more of the profits they made in Poland (30.4 billion zloty in 2015)" than they distributed as dividends (28.9 million zloty). "The greatest profits were reinvested by the companies from Germany (6.2 billion zloty), the Netherlands (5.7 billion zloty) and France (2.5 billion zloty)," the reports said. It also found that foreign investors who bought Polish companies were able to significantly boost their productivity.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) is "the most effective conveyor of new, more effective technologies and innovations in corporate culture as well as the fastest way to engage national companies into the globalised economy."
Poland's rightwing government was forced last September to suspend a new tax on supermarkets that targeted foreign-owned chains after the European Union opened a probe into whether it violated competition rules. Warsaw imposed the new tax in July in an effort to finance social programmes and broaden popular support for the Law and Justice (PiS) government.
It largely applied to big groups such as France's Auchan and Carrefour and Germany's Lidl or Metro, sparing locally-owned retailers.
Brussels and conservative-led Poland have been caught up in bitter feud over a wave of populist reforms that the EU warns threaten democracy and the rule of law in the ex-communist EU and Nato state.