Pole star
THE Poles are the meetins' novelty. Ministers and officials stuck with their own familiar problems are happy to take time off and suggest how to solve Poland's, and its finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, whose predecessor was scarcely the catch of IMF week, finds himself much in de- mand, with queues outside his delegation's office. He has learned that they offer him everything except what he is shortest of, which is money. They say that they tried offering money last time. Britain even gave the Poles ships with money on top of them. There is not much to show for it all except an impossible foreign debt, which saw Poland in trouble with its payments even before Mexico. Most of that debt is owed to Western governments, which, as soon as Poland has agreed a programme of reform with the IMF, will have to start taking it on the chin. After that comes the business of turning Poland into a market economy — and how do you do that, from scratch? Nigel Lawson is full of ideas. He has an educational fund for teaching Polish mana- gers how to allocate resources by other means than making everyone wait. He wants to show the Poles how to privatise and even to set up enterprise zones. There must be some derelict warehousing or abandoned waterway which the magic of the markets could make into a financial centre, or try to, anyway. The Poles themselves want to set up more banks, with Western partners; do not expect the British banks to rush in, either as partners or as lenders. I see an export opportunity for a British publisher, so long as he is careful to get full insurance from the Export Credit Guarantee Department, to run off a Polish edition of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help.
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