Expensive butter, cheaper sugar, fuel and real estate remain unchanged. This was 2024 in the economy

When talking to economists about what this year has been like, it’s hard to be overly enthusiastic. “There was no madness”, “We have calmed down”, “It looks average” – these are the most frequently heard comments.

– What worries me is not the past year, but what lies ahead. There will be a record deficit. Billions for the army, health care, 800+, additional pensions, increases for the budget, CPK, power plants – enumerates prof. Ryszard Bugaj.

– This is some kind of Tusk Olympics. Some will want him to maintain everything, but these are gigantic expenses that lead to an increase in debt. If the problems in Germany, our main trading partner, deepen, the decline in the growth rate of the Polish economy may accelerate. And we will have a serious problem, because the costs of servicing our debt will increase even more. I don’t have an optimistic forecast, he adds.

– The announced 3%. There will be no GDP growth this year – says Marek Zuber, economist and financial market analyst.

For this to happen, some miracle would have to happen in December and Poles would have to go into a pre-Christmas shopping frenzy. Because the domestic economy is being pulled by one engine this year, i.e. domestic consumption. The rest didn’t work. Exports weakened, mainly due to the poor situation in Germany, which has been in recession for a second year. We still have little investment, although funds from the KPO were supposed to bring revival this year, but these funds are still frozen, despite their official release. Mainly because of slow bureaucracy, which is our national specialty in making people’s lives difficult.

Looking at the entire Polish economy, in the coming years we will live more and more on credit.

– Railways, energy, transport, defense spending. We will borrow a lot of money for all this. Next year 10 percent state budget, there will be only interest on debts, when normally it was 5-6 percent. – says Marek Zuber.

Despite these threats, we are not doing too badly. Poland still remains the growth leader in our part of Europe. And it is expected to remain so next year. The only question remains about the country’s long-term economic policy, because we do not want to be remembered only as a “green island”. What kind of economy do we want to be, what should we specialize in, how can we help domestic entrepreneurs, how can we open up more to foreign investors, and how can we finally start the other growth engines, because we cannot continue to believe that only Poles will be responsible for the dynamics of GDP when shopping.

In this summary, we want to show in more detail those areas that are closest to the pockets of an ordinary Pole. What happened in the prices of food, real estate, fuel, currencies, but also what 2024 was like for smaller entrepreneurs and the entire Polish economy. We asked experts in each of the fields mentioned above for their assessment. Here’s what they had to say.