The economic landscape in Europe has changed over the last decades. The global financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis, revealed serious flaws in the institutional design of the European economic architecture. Within the euro area, country performances have diverged with some countries experiencing still very high unemployment. By contrast, the new Member States from Central and Eastern Europe have maintained growth and are continuing to catch up.
At the same time, their governments, including the Polish one, are considering new models of socio-economic policy where growth and economic development are as important development goals as territorial and social inequalities. In Poland, this new paradigm is being implemented under the name Strategy for Responsible Development – an operationalization of the so called Morawiecki Plan. Based on 6 principles which organize the process and are linked to the role of state, of cooperation or the role of investments and savings and demographic changes, the Strategy aims at securing Poland from 5 development traps: of middle income, imbalance, average product, demographic and institutional weakness.
Increasing territorial and social inequalities seem to constitute a megatrend, which operates at the European and worldwide level. The event will thus start with a keynote, which will give an overview of European and global trends regarding wealth and income inequality.