Business start-ups in today's Poland:who and how?

Abstract

Poland provides a prime opportunity to study the emergence of businesses in newly formed capitalist economies and to compare this process with business creation elsewhere. Small businesses, which were virtually absent in Poland from 1940 to 1990, have now become, and are likely to remain, the engine of the economy in the years to come. At the same time, large state-owned firms are slowly being reorganized and privatized. In this context, determining the key factors that explain the successes and failures of private businesses in Poland should be of special interest to policy-makers in that country.