Black market may add 1% to GDP

Photo: Glowimages

GUS is obliged to start including the black market in GDP calculations, due to regulations imposed by the European Commission relating to the EU’s new accounting principles, ESA 2010.

“Initial calculations show that the GDP growth resulting from adding illegal activity to national accounts will not be higher than 1 percent,” Witold Marek Wozniak, head of the information department at GUS told daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

As Poland’s GDP this year is estimated to be 1.69 trillion zloty (403 billion euro), the value of the black market could amount to some 16.9 billion zloty (4.03 billion euro).

GUS had earlier calculated estimated values of various segments of the black market.

In 2010, prostitution, the narcotics trade and smuggling were said to be worth a total of 1.17 percent of Poland’s GDP, or 16.6 billion zloty (around 4 billion euro).

Estimates for earlier years stood at 0.98-1.31 percent of the GDP.

Owing to the new EU obligations, GUS will have to recalculate all data for previous years, starting from 1995, so as to make the figures comparable. Official data will be available in two weeks time.

Economists point out that the new GDP calculation may actually be good news for the government, which plans to decrease the public finance deficit to less than 3 percent of the gross domestic product, as required by the European Commission.

Finance Minister Mateusz Szczurek has recently said that next year’s deficit would be at 2.7 percent of the GDP. (kw/nh)