POZNAN, Poland (AP) — 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 $1 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 and integrating it with a quantum computer, one of 10 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.
“Especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, the technology started developing so rapidly in Poland,” Kowalska added. “So it was very tempting to come back.”
The guest invitation to the G20 summit is mostly symbolic; no guest country has been promoted to full member since the original G20 met at the finance minister level in 1999, and that would take a consensus decision of all the members. Moreover, the original countries were chosen not just by GDP rank, but by their “systemic significance” in the global economy.
But the gesture reflects a statistical truth: In 35 years — a little less than one person's working lifetime — Poland’s per capita gross domestic product rose to $55,340 in 2025, or 85% of the EU average. That's up from $6,730 in 1990, or 38% of the EU average and now roughly equal to Japan’s $52,039, according to International Monetary Fund figures measured in today's dollars and adjusted for Poland’s lower cost of living.
Poland’s economy has grown an average 3.8% a year since joining the EU in 2004, easily beating the European average of 1.8%.
