Abstract:

This paper’s research goal is to investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic period on the degree of short- and long-term public debt (un)sustainability in Poland. The following hypothesis supports this goal: an inability to generate primary surpluses in the General Government sector and significantly growing public debt values – recorded during Poland’s pandemic period – precluded public debt sustainability. The data were taken from Eurostat, European Commission official publications, and the Polish Ministry of Finance official database. The research methods derive directly from the idea of intertemporal budget constraint – we used the Primary gap indicator (for the short-term analysis). We also tested the Ponzi scheme initial condition (for the long-term study). The empirical results proved the research hypothesis to be true.