Sarmatian Review Data
Sarmatian Review Data

Summary/Abstract: Decrease in industrial production in the first two years of the shock therapy: 30 percent. Unemployment: from zero to 25 percent (in 1993), the highest in the European Union. Lingering unemployment for those younger than twenty-four years: 40 percent in 2006. Increase in poverty: in 1989, 15 percent of the population lived below poverty line; in 2003 59 percent of Poles fell below that line. Percentage of Poles in 1992 that opposed privatization of heavy industry: 60 percent. Number of Solidarity strikes by 1992: over 6,000. Amount of aid George H.W. Bush offered Poland to alleviate the Jeffrey Sachs-Leszek Balcerowicz shock therapy: 119 million dollars, or less than three dollars per person. Naomi Klein’s assessment of the shock therapy process in Poland: “A massacre.” Source: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador-Henry Holt, 2007), 222–23, 241–44.

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