Origins
The Second Polish Republic was, in comparison to Western European standards, a poor and backward country, and its economy was far behind such nations, as Germany, Great Britain and France. The most developed areas were concentrated in the west, in the territories which had belonged to the German Empire (especially Upper Silesia), while central and eastern parts of Poland were underdeveloped, with high unemployment. The Great Depression hit Poland hard, especially in the countryside.
Late 1920s and early 1930s were times of crisis, but the overall situation began to improve around 1935. European economies began to recover, and foreign investments reappeared in Poland. This created a visible economic revival, nevertheless, millions of people, especially in overpopulated areas in the south, were unemployed. Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski wanted to change the situation, and on June 10, 1936 in the Polish Parliament, he sketched his four-year national investment plan. According to his project, the plan would cost between 1650 - 1800 million zlotys, and it was based on Polish capital. A year later, it turned out that initial costs were insufficient and Kwiatkowski raised them to 2400 million zlotys.
Read more about this topic: Four Year Plan (Poland)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)