Fiscal Rules and Fiscal Illusions – The Experience of Poland

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide the synthetic presentation of over twenty years of Poland’s experience in establishing and obeying the system of fiscal rules. This experience depicts the scale of problems entailed by public authorities’ low determination as regards observance of constraints imposed on them. Therefore, it is necessary to substantially reinforce the budgetary frameworks in Poland with the use of the best European models. Firstly, the ESA 2010 standards should be fully implemented into the Polish legal order. Secondly, the Polish system of fiscal rules should be complemented with the budget balance rule, which would make it easier to achieve and maintain a medium-term budgetary objective defined by the EU regulations. Thirdly, a fiscal institution should be established, which would allow for constant and independent of the government monitoring of the observance of fiscal rules. Such institutional changes would make it possible to constrain the discretionary nature of the fiscal policy and, consequently, would increase Poland’s fiscal sustainability in the medium and long term. The basic research methods used in this paper are dogmatic analysis and comparative legal analysis.