Poland vs. Lithuania: How Two Special Economic Zone Models Produced Such Different Results

FTZ News: Poland and Lithuania sit next to each other on the map and share a border, a Soviet past, and European Union membership. Their approach to special economic zones, though, diverged once both countries got the tool running.
Poland built 14 separate zones, run by 14 separate management companies, scattered across the country starting in the mid-1990s. In 2018, it kept that administrative structure but erased the zones' physical boundaries, making the whole country technically eligible for the same tax relief that used to require a company to set up inside a fenced industrial park. Lithuania kept its zones geographically fixed — seven of them, plus roughly nine smaller industrial parks grouped into the same broader category — and has not expanded the model nationwide. The 2018 reform was a major factor in widening access to Poland's investment incentives, though the much larger gap in results also reflects two countries operating at fundamentally different scales: 38 million people against 2.9 million, and a far larger pre-existing industrial base in Poland's case.

Investment

Since the 2018 reform, the Polish Investment Zone has issued 3,054 support decisions worth a combined 132.5 billion zlotys, roughly 30 billion euros — a figure that, by the zone operators' own description, represents pledged capital expenditure tied to signed support agreements, not necessarily capital already spent.

Academic research on the pre-2018 system, using counterfactual methods, found that SEZ investment in Poland’s poorest regions generally did not displace investment elsewhere — one spatial-panel study found it added to regional capital stock roughly one-to-one — while the effect was weak or negative in wealthier regions. Whether the same pattern holds under the nationwide system introduced in 2018 has not been established by a comparable study.

In 2025 alone, companies committed to 21.3 billion zlotys, about 4.9 billion euros, across 617 new decisions, which zone officials called the largest single-year commitment in three years. Individual legacy zones carry their own decades-long totals: Mielec has drawn pledges exceeding 20.5 billion zlotys since 1995, Tarnobrzeg more than 23.5 billion zlotys.
Lithuania's totals run in the hundreds of millions, not billions. Kaunas FEZ, established in 1996, has attracted more than 680 million euros, with foreign direct investment accounting for over 70% of that. Published estimates for Klaipėda FEZ, opened in 2002, vary from 643 million to 825 million euros; the sources carrying each figure do not explain clearly enough what separates them — different cutoff years or different definitions of qualifying investment are both plausible, but neither this report nor the underlying sources confirm which. Separately, Klaipėda FEZ's roughly 100 resident companies reported combined revenue of 1.2 billion euros in 2025 — a measure of ongoing business activity, not investment, and not directly comparable to the figures above.

Number of zones and what's inside them

Poland: 14 zone-management companies, now administering incentives nationwide rather than within fixed perimeters. Lithuania: seven named Free Economic Zones — Kaunas, Klaipėda, Šiauliai, Kėdainiai, Panevėžys, Akmenė and Marijampolė — plus the additional industrial parks counted alongside them in some government tallies.
The industrial mix differs in ways that loosely track each country's broader economy, though the examples below illustrate rather than systematically document that pattern. Legnica SEZ in Poland counts Volkswagen Motor Polska and BASF among roughly 77 investors. In Lithuania, Šiauliai FEZ concentrates on metal, plastics, textiles and electronics; Kėdainiai's marquee project is a 20 million euro industrial gas plant built by Linde Engineering for AGA; Panevėžys FEZ's listed tenants include a 13 million euro investment from the Norwegian apparel maker Devold.

Employment

Polish zones report lifetime employment figures that individually rival or exceed Lithuania's entire FEZ system: Katowice SEZ cites roughly 38,000 jobs, Wałbrzych about 25,000, Mielec more than 50,000. These figures span different time periods under different zones' own reporting and are not necessarily built on the same definitions of a "job created" — this report could not confirm whether they count new jobs only or also jobs maintained through later investment, and they should not be summed or compared zone-to-zone as though standardized. The Polish Investment Zone's nationwide post-2018 total is 51,924 new jobs through 2024; what exactly that figure includes — newly created positions only, or some maintained positions as well — is not spelled out in the available reporting. 2025 brought a different signal: zone operators themselves described that year as producing the fewest jobs on record even as capital pledges hit a three-year high. Whether that reflects more capital-intensive projects, a shift in the industry mix, longer lag times between a pledge and actual hiring, or heavier automation is not something the available figures establish; it is a pattern worth watching, not a conclusion this report can draw.
Lithuania's comparison point is older: Kaunas FEZ had created more than 5,500 jobs as of 2019, the most recent year-specific figure available for that zone. That is not a same-period comparison with Poland's more recent numbers, and should be read as a snapshot from a different year rather than a current figure.

A correction on investment incentive thresholds

An earlier version of this report characterized a lowered Lithuanian investment threshold — 1.448 million euros and 20 jobs — as a general lowering of the bar for FEZ investment. That was wrong. The threshold applies specifically to companies producing military equipment, armaments, vehicles or other technology deemed critical to the armed forces, under the "Investment Highway" framework that took effect November 1, 2025. The standard threshold under that same framework, applicable to other investors, remains 20 million euros and 150 jobs — or 30 million euros and 200 jobs for projects in Vilnius. The defense-sector carve-out does not indicate a broader lowering of Lithuania's bar for ordinary investors, and should not have been presented that way.
### Where the data runs out
Export value and import value specifically attributable to goods moving through these zones — as opposed to each country's national trade totals — are not published in a standardized, zone-level format that this report could locate for either country. The same gap applies to a clean breakdown of export destinations by zone. National export profiles exist (Lithuania's include refined petroleum, furniture, machinery and electrical equipment; Poland's are weighted toward automotive parts and machinery), but attributing a specific export value or destination market to "the Polish Investment Zone" or "Lithuania's FEZs" as a bloc would require data this report does not have access to.

The bottom line

Poland's zones operate at a scale Lithuania's cannot match, for reasons that go well beyond the 2018 reform: population, industrial history and market size all point the same direction. The reform widened access to incentives across Poland; it did not create the underlying gap. Lithuania's zones remain smaller and more concentrated around a handful of anchor tenants, which fits an economy roughly the size of a mid-sized Polish voivodeship rather than reflecting a policy failure. Whether Lithuania's defense-sector fast-track or its broader Investment Highway reform narrows any part of that gap is not something the current data can yet show.