How has Poland become one of the world's top economies?

WARSAW Poland also benefited from billions of euros in EU aid, both before and after it joined the bloc in 2004 and gained access to its huge single market. Above all, there was the broad consensus, from across the country’s political spectrum, that Poland’s long-term goal was joining the EU

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Never skyscrapers flank the communist-era Palace of Culture and Science, (foreground) in Poland.

(File/Associated Press)

A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour while its citizens were paid one-tenth what West Germans earned.

Today its economy has edged past Switzerland to become the world's 20th largest with over $I trillion in annual output. It’s a historic leap from the post-Communist ruins of 1989-90 to today's European growth champion that economists say has lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people — and that the Trump administration says should be recognized by Poland's presence at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies later this year.

The transformation is reflected in people like Joanna Kowalska, an engineer from Poznan, a town of half a million people midway between Berlin and Warsaw. She returned home after five years in the U.S. “I get asked often if I'm missing something by coming back to Poland, and, to be honest, I feel it's the other way around,” Kowalska said. “We are ahead of the United States in so many areas.”

Kowalska works at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, which is developing the first artificial intelligence factory in Poland andintegrating it with a quantum computer, one of IO on the continent financed by a European Union program. Kowalska worked for Microsoft in the U.S. after graduating from the Poznan University of Technology in a job she saw as a “dream come true.”

But she missed having a “sense of mission,” she said.