Mieczyslaw Wilczek's law
Eastern approaches 2014-05-16
Summary:
POLAND is one of Europe's post-communist success stories, boasting more than two decades without a recession. But ask many Polish entrepreneurs when the country had the best conditions for running a business and the answer, surprisingly, is 1988, the last year of communist rule.
That was when Mieczyslaw Wilczek, an inventor and entrepreneur, took the reins as industry minister and pushed through a radical law that broke with communist orthodoxy by ending most business restrictions. "Undertaking economic activity is free and permitted to everyone," read its opening paragraph. Instead of being hampered by communist regulation limiting the number of workers a company could employ and forcing would-be entrepreneurs through regulatory hoops, it now became very simple to start a business. Within two years almost 2m new ones were opened.
Mr Wilczek died last month at the age of 82, but the law that bears his name (and was in force, albeit amended, until 2000) is still a touchstone for business-friendly regulation.
The law did not save the ailing communist regime , which lost power to the opposition in 1989, but it did set off a...Continue reading