The state’s role in the political and economic system of Poland, the United States and China

Abstract

Poland was the first post-communist country whose system transformation
was based on the concepts of neoliberalism. It had been developed in the
United States and one of its main ideological principles was to eliminate the
state from the economy and to limit its role in the non-economic spheres. The
authors attempt to assess structural changes in Poland, the USA and China.
Their thesis suggests that the process of implementing new principles, in the
USA from the early 1980s, i.e. after the Keynesian policy was rejected, and
in Poland from the early 1990s, had to lead to the dysfunction of the state
and the deformation of financial markets. They emphasise the fact that the
American financial crisis had an academic background, which is confirmed
by the process of implementing harmful concepts of the banking system
deregulation propagated by L. Summers, the former President of Harvard
University, and the concept of faulty monetarism proposed by M. Friedman,
the leader of the Chicago school of economics. The assessment of the structural
changes in China shows some similarities but also substantial differences.
While the neoliberal system of the West was created as a mixture of the
ideology of minarchism and monetarism, which lead to the disastrous crisis,
the Chinese solutions are a mixture of different elements, i.e. privatisation
bestowing property on the communist elite and elements of the so-called
socialist market economy with the dominance of the state as an organ of the
communist party.