It's a country in Europe, the same size as Italy and with a population as big as that of Spain, it's by far the largest of the east European states waiting to join the European Union ... Poland. The Poles are eager to become members quickly, but are being told they may have to wait more than five years, for their economy to pass the 'membership test'. Our European Affairs correspondent William Horsley has just visited Poland and applied his own informal test of its state of readiness, and as the reports, the Poles passed that test, with flying colours.

"Yes, that's right, the BBC asks if the finance minister would drive once more round the block, with the cameraman in the seat beside him ...!" There was a pause on the crackly mobile phone line, and I wondered how Piotr would react to this unusual request. "Well, the security men won't like it", came the reply,"but I'll do my best to persuade them ... and I'll let you know."

Piotr was the young personal assistant of the Polish finance minister. I had thanked him for arranging for us to film the minister arriving at the cabinet office, but added, it would make for even better pictures if our cameraman, Nick Wells, could get into the minister's car with him for a few minutes, so he could film him there in close-up, being driven through the streets to his office.

It was a severe test of the flexibility of these senior members of the new Polish government team. It was not yet seven in the morning. It was perishingly cold. Piotr and I had never met. And we were due to take up another half an hour of the minister's time in the afternoon as well, to do the interview which we had also been promised.

Piotr, when he appeared, was a tall, engaging young man, a former disciple of the minister from the economics faculty of Warsaw University. "It's okay", he said with a smile. I was impressed. And I attributed the positive response not so much to the magic effect of the letters 'BBC' in Poland, but to the agility of mind of both Piotr and his boss, Leszek Balcerowicz. Leszek Balcerowicz, it's a name which, appearing on the list of senior cabinet ministers, one western banker estimated to be worth at least $2bn to Poland's credit ratings.

After the fall of communism in Poland Leszek Balcerowicz was finance minister in the first two Solidarity governments, and the author of what was called the 'shock therapy' against the severe sickness brought on by the force-feeding of the Polish economy during the years of communist rule.

Balcerowicz then drew up a master-plan for liberalising the economy: prices, wages, and much of state-controlled industry. The result was a period of strong growth, and a surprising surge in the start-up of small and medium businesses, surprising even to the Poles .. but also turbulence, and for some time, high unemployment.

And in elections four and a half years ago Polish voters showed they wanted to slow down the pace of change - by voting out Balcerowicz and voting in an alliance made up of reformed communists and the Polish Peasants' Party. The pace of change did slow down. But what was called the 'Balcerowicz plan', for balanced budgets, freer markets and stability, went on without him. And the new class of entrepreneurs began to expand their ambitions.

Suddenly, Poland overtook its neighbours in eastern Europe as a target for foreign investment and in its pace of development. It had one advantage over all the other candidates for the EU, the size of its population, nearly 40 million, and so the sheer size of its domestic market. Now, the Polish car industry is the fastest-growing in Europe, with investments from Italy, the USA and South Korea. Many of the new jobs have gone to the old coal-mining region of Silesia, Poland's 'black country', and are starting to regenerate that region as a modern centre of industry.

On the cold Baltic coast I came across a prime example of the new can-do spirit of post-communist Poland. In the handsome port city of Szczecin, the old shipyard has come back to life. And now, as the frenzy of welding and hammering suggests, it is well in contention to be counted as the most successful shipyard in all of Europe. The boss of the yard, Krzysztof Piotrowski, an engineer-businessman, showed me how his business was building made-to-order container ships in a shorter time-frame even than the Koreans can do it, and exporting them to clients in Germany, South Africa, South America and Hong Kong. One of his staff told me "the workers here believe in the future."

So, now that he's back in office, Leszek Balcerowicz has no time to lose. After completing his extra drive round the block, for the BBC's camera to film him, the finance minister, who's also the deputy prime minister, bounded up the stairs like an athlete, he confided to me afterwards he had in fact been one: basketball was his sport. And he got straight to work on his next set of plans, to cut taxes and release the full energy of Polish free enterprise.

His most dramatic ambition is to do for Poland what only very few countries, including Japan and South Korea, have ever achieved ... to double the nation's wealth within ten years. He coolly outlined how this was entirely possible if only present growth rates continued, and he concluded, quite casually, that if it worked, yes, Poland could become an 'economic tiger'.

That is the test which Poland's high-powered finance minister has set for his country. As for my own impromptu test of the Poles' ability to get things done, well, they passed that in style.
 

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