Wages in China have increased by 500% from 1994 to 2024, by far the highest rate of increase of any country

What gets lost in the Poland success story is the scale of the Western financial intervention in the early 90s. It wasn't just a few loans. The US alone kicked in nearly a billion dollars in grants and aid right out of the gate to stop the economy from collapsing. Then 200 million for the Polish Stabilization Fund in 1990 that made their new currency actually work. But the really big one, the thing no other post-communist country got on that level, was the debt forgiveness. The Paris Club, with the US leading the charge, straight up cancelled half of Poland's official government debt. We're talking about wiping clean 50% of a 30 billion dollar tab. The US forgave about 2.4 billion of the 3 billion Poland owed it. That was a massive, deliberate financial reset button.

So when people talk about Poland's climb from low to high income, the real story is that the climb started on a foundation built with hundreds of millions in direct grants and one of a kind debt haircut orchestrated by the West. They did the hard work, for sure, but they were able to do it standing on a mountain of forgiven debt and direct cash that simply wasn't available to others in the same way.