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This study focuses on the effects of Poland’s reforms in the period 1990e2005 on corruption in the health care system. In the last 15 years Poland has transformed its economy drastically, introducing market-oriented reforms into almost every aspect of its economy. In this study we consider how different reforms changed incentives and mechanisms facilitating corruption in the medical care sector. Our conclusion is that corruption in Poland’s medical sector has worsened since the onset of the marketization reforms. We support this conclusion primarily by analyzing changes in incentives for corruption and the number of mechanisms facilitating it. In addition, where available, quantitative data are provided, though we recognize that numerical estimates of corruption are subject to substantial error. We focus on three major forms of corruption: patient payments to secure medical treatment or improve its quality, payments from industry (mostly pharmaceutical and medical equipment producers), and the use by physicians of free public facilities for private patients.

Since 1990, marketization has fundamentally altered Poland's economy. Like many former Soviet bloc countries, Polish prices, wages, and foreign trade have been liberalized, and many state assets are now privatized. Independent central banks, commercial banking systems, and stock exchanges have been formed, and the taxation and legal systems have been restructured to support a market economy. The dominant view is that this process should benefit most Poles over time. For Polish women, however, the first phase of economic transition was a mixed blessing. This paper explores their experiences in between 1990 and 2003 and discusses two positive, mutually supportive ways that Polish women have benefited during transition: First, the segmentation of the labor market has positioned women advantageously in the country's key financial sector and entrepreneurial ranks. Second, women have benefited from the growth of a women's movement. Together, these two processes can be expected to accelerate the pace of positive changes for Polish women.Poland, transition, labor market segmentation, women in the labor market, JEL Codes: J16, J1, P20,

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In this paper, we take a detailed look at one Polish bank's experiences with financial sector reforms focusing on a bank-led enterprise-restructuring plan that linked directly bank privatization and recapitalization to bad-debt workouts. Based on personal interviews and original statistical data, we evaluate the performance of Bank Depozytowo-Kredytowy (BDK) in promoting financial and operational restructuring of its clients. We found that BDK continued to provide soft lending to keep four old military‐industrial companies afloat and actually increased its exposure to these companies during the program. The five success stories among BDK's clients were companies that had external agents other than the bank promoting and monitoring their operational restructuring. From our case study of BDK, we conclude that, while banks may play a role in financial restructuring of their clients, their ability to affect operational restructuring is quite limited. Moreover, stateowned banks are particularly vulnerable to incentive problems when dealing with large state-owned enterprises that may be too big or too political to fail.