Taxes and Benefits in the Polish Parliamentary Election Campaigns

The upcoming parliamentary elections in Poland, scheduled for the 25th of October 2015, have on the one hand stimulated debate on the record of the current coalition government, and on the other opened the debate on the nature of socio-economic policy to be conducted in the coming years. In this brief, we draw on two recent pre-election reports published by the Centre for Economic Analysis, CenEA. We discuss developments in tax and benefit policies under the coalition of the Civic Platform and the Polish People’s Party over the last eight years, as well as the pre-election pledges regarding tax and benefit policies to be implemented after the elections. We show a significant shift in policy priorities with respect to the distributional effect of the tax-benefit policies between the first (2007- 2011) and the second (2011-2015) term in office, towards more support for low-income families. We also argue that, judging by the presented electoral pledges, Polish voters face a difficult choice between the promises of the opposition parties, which seem too costly to be realistic, and an enigmatic tax overhaul reform proposed by the governing Civic Platform, which is supposed to substantially benefit nearly all working households at a low cost for the state budget, with details of the reform design, however, kept away from public scrutiny.