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The innovation of the index is that it evaluates separately the efficiency of public spending and private spending in the economy, relying on other widely recognized indices and measuraes. This time, the indications of the WNI correspond to the situation at the beginning of 2022, i.e. the moment of recovery from the COVID-19 epidemic. It is therefore interesting to compare them with the first edition of the index, which depicted the situation on the eve of the pandemic; one can thus see how the economies examined in both the first and current study (i.e. the EU countries and the UK) have coped with the global socio-economic crisis.
A pattern among European Union countries is the decrease in the indication of WNI in the west of the continent and the increases noticed in the east. The largest EU economies lost compared to 2020: Germany 2.1 points (2.2%), France 3.4 points (4.2%), and Italy 0.7 point (0.9%). On the other hand, Eastern European countries, at least in the economic aspect, seem to have left the COVID-19 epidemic behind. With few exceptions such as Czechia, our region's economies recorded higher WNI scores than two editions ago. Poland is leading with 4.2 points (7.0%) above the score of two years ago. Croatia (plus 3.7 points, or 6.4%), Lithuania (3.6 points, or 5.1%), Bulgaria (2.1 points, or 4.5%) or Estonia (2.9 points, or 4.1%) did almost equally well.
After last year's promotion, this year Poland maintained its 27th position in the WNI ranking with a score of 64.4 points; if the growth rate of Poland's WNI can be maintained in the next two or three years, we should expect to overtake Portugal (67.8 points in the current edition). At the same time, it should be noted that the private economy is responsible for all of this year's growth in Poland's WNI: our index is the sum of real private spending per capita and the quality index of public spending, and the latter, in the case of Poland, declined year-on-year from 61.2 to 59.1, or by 2.1 points. This was one of the largest declines in the quality of public spending in the entire study group - only Ireland (-4.5 points), Slovakia, and Chile (-3.0 points each) recorded larger declines.
The author of the calculations is economist Karol Zdybel. We encourage you to read the report.
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