abandoned and priority was given to pragmatic issues and moves. Searching for ways to improve the economy and conscious of its alienation from the industrial working class, the regime turned toward market reforms with an increasingly significant from the mid-1980s elite-oriented liberal component. Marketization, formalized by a 1988 statute on economic activity, was a process that would continue past the mid-1990s. Neoliberal processes may have been initiated by Deputy Prime Minister Zdzisław Sadowski and the government of Zbigniew Messner, then developed further under Minister Mieczysław Wilczek (author of the statute) and the government of Mieczysław Rakowski. "Market socialism" was introduced as the regime leaders lost their faith in the socialist system and even nomenklatura managers were threatened by the declining economy. The enterprises were to be made independent, self-financing and self-managed, which included workers' councils that were resistant to restructuring. Owners of private businesses did well in the final years of the People's Republic and the number of such entities increased. Foreign investment was also encouraged, but limited marketization failed to deliver an economic turnaround. The practice of centralized economic decision making had not been overcome, while the newly autonomous enterprises moved toward a rather spontaneous and chaotic partial privatization of dubious legality; it included elements of kleptocracy and had a significant middle-level nomenklatura component. On a more basic level, countless ordinary Poles took advantage of the changing attitudes and became involved in a great variety of income-producing activities. The deepening economic crisis caused a marked deterioration in quality of life of ordinary citizens and resulted in increasing political instability. Rationing and queuing became a way of life, with ration cards (kartki) necessary to buy consumer staples. The ration cards were utilized by the government in order to avoid allowing market regulation of income and prices and thus risking social unrest. As Western institutions were no longer willing to extend credit to the de facto bankrupt Polish government, access to goods that the Poles needed became even more restricted. Most of the scarce resources of Western currency available had to be used to pay the crushing rates on Poland's foreign debt, which reached US$27 billion by 1980 and US$45 billion in 1989. The government, which controlled all official foreign trade, responded by maintaining a highly artificial exchange rate with Western currencies. The exchange rate worsened distortions in the economy at all levels, resulting in a growing black market and the