Rolands Petersons, member of the board of Norman Logistics Sp.zo.o., offers his perspective
For several years now, Poland has been able to significantly reduce the number of people living at risk of poverty or social exclusion from almost 28% in 2010 to 19.5% in 2017 according to Eurostat.
Poland is among the TOP 3 countries at the European Union level, where young people in the 18-24 age group are leaving school with complete education. In the European Union as a whole, almost 11% of the population abandon school prematurely and put themselves at risk of unemployment and poverty, whereas in Poland it is only 5%.
In Poland, the contribution to R&D and innovation is about 1% of GDP. The highest, full 1%, was in 2013. Since 2003, when it was only 0.54%, it was slowly but gradually increasing. The sharpest increase was from 2011 to 2012 – from 0.75 to 0.88%.
The employment rate in the country is only slightly lagging behind the target, and overall Poland is showing steady and stable economic growth – in 2017, GDP per capita was EUR 11,800 compared with the situation in 2000, when it was EUR 6,400 per capita. It should be noted that during two decades, the state has never experienced a sudden decrease in this indicator.
R. Petersons believes that in forthcoming future, Poland has to able to contribute more than 1% of GDP to R&D as investments in innovation, development of modern technologies and high value added products, of information technologies and full use of the digital revolution plays a key role in transforming traditional economy into unified digital economy worldwide. On average, EU countries contribute already 2% of their GDP in promoting competitiveness.
Poland is the absolute leader among the countries with the smallest number of crimes – according to Eurostat statistics, only slightly more than 5% of the population reported having been exposed to violence, crime and vandalism.
Greenhouse gas emissions were over 12 tons per person in the 1990s, currently – more than 10 tons per person with upward trends, the lowest figure of which was 10 tons in 2002 according to Eurostat data.
Logistics in the EU is dominated by road freight, followed by sea freight, railroads and inland waterways, and finally air freight.
Norman Logistics Sp.zo.o member of the Board, Rolands Petersons, assumes that Poland’s difficulties in reducing its emissions can partly be explained by the fact that 8.1% of all EU international road freight takes place in Poland, which ranks Poland 3rd out of the 28 competing countries, according to 2016 data.
