Wide context

Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

Before 1989 we had known only one kind of commerce: small shops in which you could hardly find anything to buy. We had not known that there might be more brands of coffee than just one, imported from the USSR. However, with the collapse of the communist regime this established situation changed rapidly. People would take advantage of economic freedom as well as of the gaps in regulations and would open shops. This tendency was very good for the state of the national economy. Small family enterprises absorbed those people who were made redundant as a result of large-scale cutbacks. They also stimulated people's initiative and largely contributed to the economic growth.