摘要：This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth in Poland and selected elements
of fiscal policy and private spending on education. We use the Mankiw-Romer-Weil model,
augmented with learning-by-doing and spillover-effects and with concepts from the literature on
optimal fiscal policy. We demonstrate that, from 2000-2015, economic growth in Poland was primarily
driven by rapid improvements in the level of human capital (at 4.4% per annum) coupled
with a rapid increase in public capital (6.0%) and secondarily due to the accumulation of private
capital (2.1% annually). Simulations of tax cuts suggest that a synchronized reduction of all tax rates
by 5 percentage points (pp) in Poland should increase the annual GDP growth rate by approximately
0.32 pp. Increasing (private or public) spending on education by 1 pp of the GDP would
increase the growth rate by approximately 0.3 pp. We also analyze the effects of increasing public
capital. The stock of public capital in Poland is still below the optimal level, and it may be beneficial
to increase investment in public capital at the cost of public consumption (which is intuitively clear)
and – to some extent – at the cost of public spending on education.
关键词：optimal fiscal policy; income taxes; labor taxes; capital taxes; economic growth; human capital;
public capital
