President Lech Kaczyński drew international attention last week when he said, “I will say this straight. My country’s place is within the G-20.”

The president, speaking during a meeting with foreign diplomats in Warsaw, had not made this point before, but by objective measures it seems that Poland should be part of the Group of Twenty.

World Bank figures for 2008 – the most recent available – show that Poland has the world’s 18th largest economy in terms of GDP. Poland posted a GDP growth of 1.7 percent last year, becoming the only European country to avoid recession amid the global downturn.

Professor Wojciech Bieńkowski, dean of the economics and management department at Lazarski University in Warsaw, described the president’s statement as a good marketing move.

“Unintentionally it coincided with the announcement of the government’s public reform plan. It all attracts attention to Poland, which is enough for now,” he told WBJ. “If Poland manages to carry out the public finance reform, in two to three years it will be more justifiable for us to join this group,” he added.

According to Jan Hagen from the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, reshaping the G-20 in order to accept Poland is unrealistic, because the supplanted country could argue the validity of one set of statistics over another.

“Given the high growth rates of some Asian economies, Poland may itself be asked to leave in a few years. Enlargement of the G-20 could be an option, but this has already proven impractical as seen in the G-22 and G-33 in 1999,” he told WBJ. Mr Hagen also pointed out that Poland is already represented within the G-20 by the rotating EU presidency.

Currently the G-20 includes countries whose economies lie outside the top 20.