Purpose: To analyse the issue of public debt in Poland and examine its effect on other areas of socio-economic life as well as government policy.
Approach: The question of public debt is placed in its historical context by looking at how it grew during the Communist system and influenced the transition period. The article draws on a range of secondary economic statistics and considers in detail a number of public policy issues, such as the reform of the pension system.

Findings: One result of the large debt incurred by the end of the 1970s was that Poland became indebted to creditors in the West. This dependency helped to shape its economic policy at the end of the 1980s. The transition to a market economy placed new burdens on the country’s public services, primarily due to the resulting large deactivation of labour. Furthermore, the creation of a compulsory private pension system at the end of the 1990s diverted significant funds out of the government’s budget and swelled the country’s public debt. Since the outbreak of the economic crisis, Poland has avoided a recession by increasing public investment by utilising available European Union funds. However, due to internal and external limits on the size of its public debt, the government is being pressured to reduce this spending. In order to create more fiscal room, the government has partly dismantled the compulsory private pension system as a short-term solution to the growing debt crisis.

Value: In the wake of the global financial crisis and economic turmoil in the European Union, the matter of public debt has taken on increased importance. This paper considers this question from a long-term perspective in a country that has been relatively successful during the international economic downturn. By examining public debt from this broad perspective, we can better understand the economic situation in Poland and the European Union, whilst also shedding light on some of the surrounding academic perspectives and public policy debates.

Purpose: The article aims at analyzing the functional form of the relation between the level of public debt and the government bond yields in both developed and developing countries. A surge in public indebtedness following the financial crisis in 2008-2010 undermined the credibility of sovereigns in the credit markets. As a result, the government bond yields have risen, thus amplifying the problem of rapidly expanding public debts.
The purpose of the article is to estimate the threshold value of government debt above which its service costs rapidly increase.

Methodology: The relation between the 10-year government bond real interest rate and the level of debt is investigated with the use of spline regression with cubic splines. The regression model is estimated using annual data for 66 countries that spans between the years 1980-2010. An additional analysis is conducted for the last decade and after splitting the sample into high-income and catching-up countries.

Findings: In the sample that covers all countries and the whole 1980-2010 period no relation between the level of debt and interest rate has been detected. In the years 2001-2010 the threshold value of debt above which the real interest rate starts to grow rapidly is estimated to be around 150% of GDP in catching-up countries and about 110% of GDP in high-income countries.

Research implications: An analysis of the impact of fiscal policy on the level of interest should take into account the likely non-linearity of the relationship.

Originality: Spline regression has not yet been used in the analysis of the relation between debt and interest rate.

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to present the theoretical and empirical arguments for the causality between growing income inequality and increasing public debt within the capitalist economies.

Methodology: The paper consists of two major parts. The first part discusses the long-term changes in value of public debt and income inequality within countries, and presents the theoretical arguments for the causality between these two categories. The second part of the paper is an attempt to investigate the impact of inequality in the upper and lower parts of income distribution on an increase of public debt in a sample of OECD-countries in 1995–2010. The statistical analysis is based on calculations of: (a) correlation coefficients between income inequality and public debt; and (b) parameters of regression equations of the level and rate of growth of public debt in a sample of countries. The parameters of regression equations were calculated with ordinary least squares and fixed effects methods.

Findings: The results of the calculation illustrate that the growth of income inequality in the upper and lower parts of distribution stimulated an increase in value of public debt in the OECD countries between 1995 and 2010.