Ewa Bojar, Ph.D. and Korneliusz Pylak, Ph.D.. Katedra Ekonomii, Politechnika Lubelska, ul. Nadbystrzycka 38, Lublin, 20-618, Poland
Over the past decade Poland has experienced many important political and economic transformations. In 2004 Poland entered the European Union structures and the convergence process has started. But after nearly 3 years it occurred there are some problems concerning the process.
Polish economy develops dynamically. Poland is a stable country and a member of the EU, what for companies running their businesses in Poland, mean i.e. access to the biggest free market area all over the world. There is also both cheap labour force and well qualified workers. Finally, Poland is the biggest new member state with the biggest work force, scientific and economic potential and 38 million consumer market. On the other hand there are problems with a migration of thousands qualified workers from Poland to other EU countries.
The paper deals with convergence problems in Polish case study concerning foreign direct investments, offshoring and structural funds. FDI are brought into regions in the form of joint ventures and result in the creation of new workplaces. Offshoring is like ‘everybody wins’ issue, because it benefits also investing countries. Firstly, it allows to reduce costs, improve quality and delivery punctuality of foreign companies. This way, foreign companies become more competitive, what influence also all the investing country economy positively. Secondly, offshoring helps investing countries to invert into more productive activities, which are more efficient and value added. Then when hosting countries benefit from offshoring and improve their monetary reserves, they spend more for importing technologically advanced products from developed countries.
The last issue the paper deals with is a problem with structural funds management. The paper presents the way to implement European Funds in a pro-developmental way (not pro-social), focus on strategic synergy projects realisation based on proper timetable, adjusted to specific regional factors (enhancing regional investment attractiveness for FDI), enable individual approach to major developmental projects (increasing their effectiveness) and absorb less financial sources on good purposes (not more – on bad purposes).