Subsidies for agriculture were abandoned, credit policies for farms were tightened and farmers entered a market with competitive prices (including imports), however, the supply of farm inputs remained monopolised (Kowalski, 1993: 35). Unemployment in both rural and urban areas increased significantly during this initial period of transition, though less so than that experienced in most other Central and Eastern European countries during this time (Swinnen, Dries and Macours, 2005). The early 1990s was a transformative period and led to, among other things, a shift away from the extraction of raw materials and towards the production of processed goods for export (Gomulka, 2016).