[LINK] "Polish GDP Growth Surges on Consumer Spending, Investment"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing for Bloomberg, Milda Seputyte and Dorota Bartyzel note the continuing strength of the Polish economy.

Poland’s pace of economic growth last year almost doubled from 2013, buoyed by increased investment and consumer spending as falling prices boosted their buying power.

Gross domestic product rose 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the fastest since 2011, after a revised 1.7 percent increase in 2013, the statistics office in Warsaw said Tuesday. That matched the median estimate of 29 economists in a Bloomberg survey.

Poland, whose economy is the only one in the European Union that’s gained every year through the global financial crisis, benefited from a pickup in domestic-demand growth to 4.6 percent in 2014. Fixed investment surged 9.4 percent from 0.9 percent a year earlier, the statistics office estimated.

“Last year was a really good one for Poland, despite outside geopolitical tensions and weakness in the euro area,” Adam Antoniak, a Warsaw-based economist at UniCredit SpA’s unit Bank Pekao SA, said by e-mail. “We had a noticeable rebound of domestic demand, which was the main engine of economic expansion, and that positive trend should be continued this year, helping to maintain a similar pace of growth.”

[. . .]

The uptick in growth shows the EU’s biggest eastern economy warded off risks emanating from a slowdown in the euro area, its biggest export market. Poland also had to weather the effects of the escalating conflict in neighboring Ukraine, which affected the country through counter-sanctions imposed on Russia.