CONVERTIBILITY AND THE EXCHANGE-RATE REGIME IN POLAND

Since the beginning of the 1980s the Polish authorities have made a tremendous effort at modernizing the monetary system and the exchange-rate regime in order to set up an exchange-rate regime able to meet the challenge of a market economy. The future introduction of external zloty convertibility will allow Poland to use exchange-rate policy as market economies have been doing and will help to integrate Poland into the European Monetary System. This report presents fundamental changes that took place in Poland in the areas of convertibility, exchange-rate regime, and exchange-rate policy during the 1989-91 period. In order to illustrate and explain some developments, data referring to earlier years has been included. The report consists of four parts: The first part tackles the problem of currency liberalization and convertibility. The second part concerns changes in the parity of the Polish currency (zloty). The foreign-exchange market and convertibility issues are analyzed in part three. Remarks presented in part four relate to Poland's exchange-rate policy in the 1980s.