Privatization Model in Poland: Commercial or Social?
Piotr Lis, Joanna Mazurkiewicz, Sławomir Zwierzchlewski

Abstract
The aim of this work is to answer the question of how the process of privatization proceeded in Poland between 1990 – 2012 and what its characteristic features were. There are five basic methods of ownership transformation of state-owned enterprises delineated in this work: the capital procedure, the procedure of liquidation in the legal sense, the procedure of liquidation in the economic sense, the contribution of shares to National Investment Funds (NIF), the banking settlement procedure (BSP). Privatization was not the aim in itself, but a means to achieving widely-understood management effectiveness. The model of privatization launched in Poland was primarily characterized by the allocation of the privatized capital through market mechanism and the participation of the society in the process of ownership transformation. Thus, this model may be referred to as the commercial-social model. This work provides main reasons for the occurrence of such a model: an incredibly strong, historically-bound position of trade unions, lack of adequate capital in the hands of domestic investors, no adequate examples of big-scale privatization in the countries that could be good points of reference for Poland.

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