Politicians of all hues have queued up to take credit for the buoyant Polish economy where growth has topped 6% in recent years writes Derek Scallyin Warsaw.

Polish elections on Sunday are likely to have little or no effect on an economy which has purred on regardless through the last two years of political uncertainty.

The bad-tempered snap election campaign proved once again the adage that, while failure is an orphan, success has many fathers. Politicians of all hues have queued up to take credit for the buoyant Polish economy.

Growth has topped 6 per cent in recent years and unemployment has dropped from nearly 20 per cent to 12 per cent.

It's unclear how much that jobless drop is due to the exodus of young people to western Europe. Campaigning politicians have promised to bring home emigrants with a "Polish economic miracle" using Ireland as their blueprint.

Prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his Law and Justice (PiS) party shared power for the last year with two ideologically-opposed populist parties. The marriage was unhappy from the start as the government tried to straddle a left-right divide on social and economic policy and ultimately collapsed last month.

Since then, the government has garnered mixed reviews for its economic performance. One camp believes the government did some good, reducing labour costs and regularising the privatisation process. With a lack of economic experience, government officials were intelligent enough not to tinker too much, they say, and did the economy no harm.

But a much larger camp of economists and businessmen is highly critical of the PiS government's economic record, accusing officials of squandering a golden opportunity for comprehensive reform.

"We expected big changes before the last election, but they promised lots and did nothing," said Janusz Grobici, economic expert of the Adam Smith Institute in Warsaw.

Smart economic policies could have boosted further economic growth from 6 to over 7 per cent, he estimates, and cushioned the effects of necessary reforms of the tax system, pensions and other social spending.

"We can only estimate the further cost to the economy of their doing nothing during a period of success. The government had no economic vision," he said.

The Polish Employers Federation (KPP) has been a vocal critic: it published a study claiming that just 50 of the 400 bills passed during the life of the last parliament had an economic element, and then only had a modest economic influence.

The KPP has attacked too the government's decision to increase the minimum monthly wage by 20 per cent to 1,126 zloty (€304) starting next year.

Many business leaders are hoping that the liberal Civic Platform (PO) will replace PiS in government.

"The PiS party is suspicious of business in general and had many problems with employing competent people who know anything about the economy," said Prof Andrzej Blikle of the leading confectionery and cafe company that bears his name, Poland's upmarket answer to Bewley's.

He says these "economically ignorant" government officials have failed to tackle the growing phenomenon of companies paying minimum wages and the rest, tax-free, under the table.

"I don't want to do that and am being punished for it," says Mr Blikle.

Like many companies, Blikle is struggling to fill the economic gap left by workers now in Ireland and is unable to keep up paying salaries which have risen an average of 13 per cent in the last year to 2,644 zloty (€712) a month.

"For our kind of production work we can employ almost anyone, yet I have to find workers in Ukraine even though there are 360,000 people on the dole queue in Warsaw," he says.

Opinion is divided too over the prospects for the Polish economy, in particular its adoption of the euro. This week the finance ministry said it would inform the European Commission that Poland will be ready to join the eurozone by 2010.

The public deficit will drop to 3 per cent this year and 2.5 per cent by the end of the decade, it said, a claim rubbished by economists who say no structural reforms have been undertaken to guarantee this.

Analysts at Merrill Lynch predict that recent "give-away" economic decisions ahead of the election will drive up the deficit to 4.5 per cent next year.

"The best moment for accepting the euro has already passed," said Merrill Lynch economist RadosÅ,aw Bodys in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita.