Panstwo dobrobytu w krajach Unii Europejskiej w latach 1995-2005: Wnioski dla Polski

The role of government is one of the most important subjects of discussions among economists. This polemic tends to deal with an extent of desirable economic activity of government and it usually touches sizes of so called welfare state. Unfortunately, this discussion is often too ideological and it usually lacks sufficient empirical support. This paper aims at partial fulfilling this gap. It presents results of dynamic taxonometric analysis of the extent of traditional welfare state in case of member countries of the European Union in the years 1995-2005. The analysis takes into consideration levels of development of the countries. In case of presented empirical investigation a procedure of linear ordering was utilized. The aim of the investigation was to measure the sizes of traditionally defined welfare state in all countries and to assess an influence of these sizes on their development dynamics. The special attention was given to the underdeveloped countries that were able to reduce significantly their development gap to the highly developed countries. The presented investigation has proved that they were the countries with the lowest extent of traditional welfare state. However, Poland was classified to a group of countries with the biggest extent of welfare state in relation to their economic development. It means that keeping long term high level of GDP growth, which is necessary for reducing the development gap of Poland, requires a profound structural reform of our country.