The report Picking up momentum. Citizens’ strategy for the development of the Polish capital market is the summary of the project “Capital Market 25+”, run by WiseEuropa in 2016. The aim of the project was to diagnose the condition of the capital market in Poland and the development of specific solutions to support its operation.
As a part of the Report we presented recommendations that we believe will allow Polish capital market to “catch the wind in sails” again. Our goal was to provoke a debate on our proposed solutions among people who have a real impact and importance for this market.
It is hard to imagine a modern, innovative and fast developing economy without a well-developed capital market. Such market combines high-quality investment intermediation services with a broad operational scale. A developed capital market serves companies representing the whole economy, because financial instruments are tailored to individual needs of different types of investors. Such market is characterized among other things by high liquidity, adequate investment returns and strong presence of investors of various kinds, including pension and investment funds, insurance companies and households (Figure 1). All these features are characteristic of world capital market leaders – United Kingdom, United States and Canada. Not as spectacular but also worth looking up to is the success of some other countries: Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Sweden and South Africa.
The Polish capital market has never been developed. While only in 2010 many experts predicted a significant development of the Polish capital market within the next 15 years, nowadays such forecasts are only made by the biggest optimists. Today, without some major change, Poland can’t count on anything more than the place among European marauders – Italy, Austria and Portugal. In the last six years there has been an outburst of highly unfavorable events which all together resulted not only in a slowdown of the pace of development, but also in the development taking negative dynamics. Yet, it would be unwise to attribute such state of affairs only to factors external to the local market, including shrinking down pension funds, anti-investor behavior of state-owned companies, government regulation prepared mainly to favor the fiscal interest of the state or the Financial Crisis and its close successor, the Eurozone Crisis.
