Good policy, poorly designed

Take 500+, for instance.

PiS depicted the policy as a silver bullet for child poverty and cites Eurostat data that extreme poverty among Polish children fell from 24.2 per cent to 17.9 per cent between 2015 and 2016. In 2018, 65 per cent of Polish families said they had the means to take their children on a one-week holiday, compared to 53 per cent in 2015.

Brzezinski and other experts agree the programme has helped, but not as much as expected.

According to an analysis co-authored by Brzezinski and published by the Institute for Structural Research, only 37 per cent of the entire sum spent by the government via 500+ goes to poor families; the goal set for the reduction of child poverty, it argued, could be reached with only one eighth of the money spent.

In 2019, PiS expanded 500+ to families with one child, but experts say this new stack of cash reaches mostly middle-class and high-income families who least need it.

“From my perspective, the way this programme was designed and the lack of any evaluation of its impact prove that it was introduced for a political purpose, to bring votes,” Brzezinski said in his spartan university office.

“That goal has been met, so the government sees no need to make an assessment of its impacts on poverty.”

While overall poverty has fallen in recent years, Brzezinski said it was hard to gauge how far this was due to 500+ or simply the general state of the economy, which has been growing at rates above four per cent since 2017, and low unemployment rates that have driven up salaries with a positive impact on lower income earners.

Another economist, Ignacy Morawski, said the impact of 500+ was not insignificant, telling gazeta.pl in May that the improved position of the eurozone and the Polish government’s “social transfers” shared equal credit for Poland’s growth rates.

The cash benefits, he said, had stimulated consumption but also strengthened the bargaining power of low-income workers more secure in the knowledge they could survive for longer in the event of redundancy.

Inflation eating away at benefits

So it came as a shock over the summer when, despite the positive economic outlook, the National Statistics Office, GUS, published data indicating that extreme poverty had actually increased in Poland by roughly one per cent between 2017 and 2018.

Brzezinski blamed the government’s failure to adjust the welfare system in accordance with inflation.

“This is happening because the system is not designed properly, as it should be if the government was really interested in helping the vulnerable people in society,” he said.

“500+, like other parts of the social welfare system, is not adjusted in accordance with inflation, and neither are the thresholds for getting benefits. This means that right now, with inflation and especially food prices rising, the real value of the help people are getting is much lower.”

Brzezinki said that the high price of the 500+ programme – some nine billion euros annually or about two per cent of GDP – came at the cost of other important state spending.

Poland has seen repeated strikes by doctors and teachers over the desperate state of the health and education sectors, while other public workers complain they are underpaid.

“500+ could be good policy, but not how it is currently designed,” said Brzezinski.

“Research shows that about 100,000 women gave up work as a result of introducing this programme, so it seems to have a discouraging effect on female employment.”

“Most countries have child benefits and they are a good thing. But they should be better integrated with other elements of social benefits. For example, Western countries give significant tax credits or tax refunds to poor working people, and these could be much higher for people with children – in this way, employment would not be discouraged.”

“But such reforms are complicated to implement and explain to the public, so they would not bring votes.”