Poland is on course to graduate from the World Bank. That a rich, high-income economy still has a programme is no failure, but the point.
Andrzej Domański welcomed a new six-year plan on June 16, when the World Bank’s board met to discuss its latest partnership framework for Poland. The country’s finance minister said the programme set a course for the country to graduate from the bank after 2031. Anna Bjerde, the bank’s managing director for operations, called Poland’s record one that few countries had matched. Ary Naïm, installed in 2024 as the bank’s first country manager for Poland, had already cast the next phase as a push to the innovation frontier rather than a fight against poverty. A high-income economy whose output passed one trillion US dollars in 2025 still keeps a World Bank programme.
The relationship goes back to Leszek Balcerowicz, whose shock-therapy reforms in 1990 turned a collapsing planned economy toward the market just as the bank arrived. It has committed some 16.5 billion US dollars since. Poland crossed the bank’s high-income line, drawn at 13,935 US dollars a head, back in 2009, and kept on borrowing all the same. Output grew by 3.6 per cent in 2025, up from three per cent the year before, and income per head, a fraction of Germany’s when Balcerowicz began, now nears the western European average.
The productivity problem
Anna Akhalkatsi set out the bank’s main worry on March 12. Its country director for the European Union presented a report, Innovation Rising, that put Poland’s potential productivity gain from wider use of digital tools at 10 to 15 per cent. Polish firms spend under 1.5 per cent of GDP on research, against 2.2 per cent across the EU, and steer only 26 per cent of their investment into intangibles such as software, against 37 per cent in the bloc. Antonella Bassani, the bank’s regional vice-president, had warned in April 2025 that the old model of cheap labour and supply-chain work was running short as the workforce shrank. Naïm had reckoned much the same in 2024, when he called the work ahead a matter of productivity, not catch-up.
Wojciech Wrochna had the costlier brief. The minister steering Poland’s nuclear programme welcomed the European Commission’s clearance of the plant’s state-aid package in December 2025, calling it the culmination of his team’s work. Poland still drew 56 per cent of its electricity from coal in 2024, the highest share in the EU, much of it from ageing plants that burn cooling water the summers increasingly deny them. Then president Andrzej Duda had signed the funding bill in March 2025, committing 60 billion zloty (about 14 billion euros) of public money to the state firm building the reactor. Marzena Czarnecka, the industry minister, was blunter about timing: “I’m realistic,” she told a conference, putting a realistic opening at 2040, not the 2032 her predecessors had floated.
Much of the framework’s money is meant to be private. Bjerde promised on June 16 to mobilise capital and deepen Poland’s shallow markets rather than lend much herself; Ines Rocha, who runs the region for the International Finance Corporation, the bank’s private-sector arm, backs firms directly, while the bank’s guarantees lower the risk for commercial lenders. Domański put investment, innovation and jobs at the head of the framework’s priorities.
Carlos Piñerúa, signing off the previous framework in 2018, had promised Poland would keep its access to World Bank money after reaching high-income status. Other wealthy clients held on too. Researchers at the Center for Global Development counted 10 countries still borrowing in 2018 despite clearing the graduation income years earlier, among them Chile, Mexico, Uruguay and Romania. The bank lent again to Hungary and Latvia after the 2009 crash, when an early exit had left both exposed. South Korea, rich since the 1990s, never shut its borrowing window at all. Poland has taken more from the EU’s cohesion and recovery funds than any member state.
Bjerde made the larger claim in the same announcement: the bank would help Poland pass the lessons of its transformation to countries chasing the same path. Naïm, who joined the IFC in 2003 and spent two decades there before taking Warsaw, now oversees the country as a high-income laboratory for the guarantees and private-capital methods the bank wants to use elsewhere. Its work on Ukraine’s recovery already borrows the Polish template. The arrangement costs little and keeps the bank close to one of the few economies to have travelled the whole road from plan to market.
On Domański’s timetable the borrowing ends in 2031, four decades after the first World Bank loan reached Poland alongside Balcerowicz’s reforms.
Photo: Dreamstime.