The atmosphere of uncertainty on markets for several days now may lead to a drop in investment and consumption, taking its toll on both domestic demand and export. The difficulties of Poland’s trading partners may slow down production, triggering higher unemployment.
If the United States slips into recession and the debt crisis aggravates in the eurozone countries, Poland may not have the capacity to weather the setback as was the case in 2009, with its economic growth halting to 0 percent, warns an economist quoted by the paper.
The Polish authorities provide inadequate help to citizens living in poverty, with state’s assistance to Poles gradually dropping year by year, writes Gazeta Wyborcza in its Warsaw supplement.
While nearly 9 million people in Poland subsist below the breadline, only a tenth of the funds earmarked for the country’s most disadvantaged reaches them, as the paper reveals.
Alongside supporting the poorest citizens financially, the state should also motivate them to find their way out of their plight by encouraging them to seek employment or pursue education, says Paweł Kubicki, from the Institute for Market Economics, pointing to the need for a more active engagement on the authorities part in getting to the core of the problem and seeking ways to resolve it.
Still with Gazeta Wyborcza, which reports that the University of Warsaw and the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University are toiling through the recruitment process, now in their third round, due to a scant number of candidates who fit the bill, as the university staff explain.
This can be attributed to poor results of math exams in the high school finals, which have in recent years been reintroduced as an obligatory subject.
Meanwhile, the University of Technology is faring much better, presumably thanks to the Education Ministry’s ongoing campaign promoting technical studies and the 30-percent higher average pay of graduates of technical than those with humanistic degrees, as a recent study has shown.
The head of Polish diplomacy, Radosław Sikorski, is one of the forerunners of what Rzeczpospolita dubbed ‘tweet-o-plomacy’, with his flair for communicating with public opinion via micro-blogging website Twitter.
There are few other top officials who are as prolific in their online statements, writes the paper.
Yet while Foreign Ministers Briton William Hague, Italian Franco Frattini, and Swede Carl Bildt are also very active online, the difference is we won’t find any official statements, apologies, or announcements of future plans with regard to other states. Nor do they criticise the opposition, touch on thorny historical issues, or tweet on their private lives, a columnist with Rzeczpospolita wrote. Pointing to a stark difference between diplomacy and ‘tweetplomacy’, the author of the opinion article stressed that the Polish official must settle either, not both. (ab)