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While unions continue to play an important role in the transportation
and public sectors, they have essentially been absent in firms created
since 1990. Indeed, unions were deeply discredited by their communist-
era reputations and by the unbridled individualism that has gripped
Polish society. A further contributing factor is the much-envied high
wages--and high training costs—that prevail inside the zones.
16

Criticisms

A number of important criticisms have been leveled at the
industrial policies of Poland’s economic zones. These criticisms deserve
17
attention because they are similar to those that apply to economic
zones in the West, which proves that Eastern policies have tended to
imitate the West.

The first criticism refers to the deadweight effect of investors
motivated solely by tax incentives as well as the highest possible profits
and lowest labor costs. A counter-argument contends that, because tax
incentives are more or less identical throughout Central and Eastern
18
Europe, labor costs are not the only criterion that differentiates
between zones, and that industrial heritage and transportation
infrastructure are also important factors. Indeed, while wage competition
used to be widespread throughout Central Europe, it has been rapidly
surpassed in attracting investment by infrastructure, particularly
transportation in the region’s four more advanced countries--Poland, the
Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia.

16 François Bafoil, 2016, « The limit of Europeanisation in Central Europe. A criti
cial perspective on property rights, banking capital and industrial relations »,
Violaine Delteil, in Vassil Kirov, Labour and Social Transformation in Central and
Eastern Europe, chap. 2, Routledge, pp. 23-41
17 in Przemyslav Siudak, 2013, quoted above.
18 OECD, 2006, Business clusters. Promoting enterprises in Central Europe, LEED,
www.oecd.org

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