Karpacz has once again become Central Europe’s marketplace of ideas. As the 34th Economic Forum unfolds in the foothills of the Sudetes, the mountain resort is hosting thousands of politicians, business leaders, scholars and civic voices who treat this gathering as the region’s most reliable place to compare notes, test policy concepts and strike deals across borders. Staged from 2 to 4 September, the 2025 edition revolves around the theme “Time of Transition – What Future for Europe?”, a fitting banner for a year defined by supply-chain rewiring, war-time economics, the green transformation and the arrival of commercially viable artificial intelligence.
The scale is part of the story. Organisers expect more than six thousand participants and several hundred debates over three tightly packed days, all concentrated under one roof at the Gołębiewski Hotel. That density—sessions beginning at daybreak, corridor conversations late into the night—has made the Forum unusually effective as a regional clearinghouse: big enough to attract prime ministers and global CEOs, compact enough that a chance encounter can still change a project or a policy line. For diplomats and investors, the calendar predictability of Karpacz each September is as valuable as any single keynote.
The Forum’s location matters. Situated in southwestern Poland, with Lower Silesia as a principal institutional partner, Karpacz sits within a day’s travel of Berlin, Prague and Warsaw, drawing in Central and Eastern Europe’s public- and private-sector leadership as well as delegations from the Balkans and the Baltics. That geographic center of gravity, coupled with the event’s reputation as “the Eastern Davos,” explains why debates range effortlessly from municipal finance and health-care innovation to defense industry supply chains and Ukraine’s reconstruction. The region’s problems and prospects are discussed in one place, by the people who can act on them.
What distinguishes this year’s forum is the sense of transition being navigated in real time. Panels on energy focus less on abstract targets and more on the nitty-gritty of grid flexibility, storage, and cross-border interconnectors. Technology tracks are dominated by questions of AI adoption: how to automate safely in midsized manufacturers, how to protect data and industrial secrets, how universities and firms can share talent pipelines without draining smaller cities. Security discussions, never far from the surface in a region bordering Russia’s war on Ukraine, probe the practicalities of scaling ammunition production, coordinating procurement, and keeping sanctions enforceable while maintaining growth. In each case, the Karpacz advantage is that mayors, ministers and manufacturers are in the same building, able to turn a panel’s takeaway into a memorandum or pilot within hours.
The Forum also continues to double as a publishing moment. The annual report prepared with the SGH Warsaw School of Economics offers a data-rich snapshot of the region’s macroeconomic pulse and sectoral bottlenecks, giving policymakers and lenders a shared evidence base for the conversations that follow. That research function has helped Karpacz become more than a parade of speeches; it is increasingly a venue where datasets, case studies and draft legislation are stress-tested against the lived experience of practitioners from across Central and Eastern Europe.
For Poland, hosting the Economic Forum is a quiet exercise in soft power. It puts Warsaw’s priorities—energy security, defense industrial capacity, digital competitiveness, the modernization of public services—at the center of the regional conversation while showcasing the country’s own universities, startups and municipalities. For neighbors—from the Czech Republic and Slovakia to Romania and the Baltic states—the draw is the same: Karpacz is where leaders can hold a dozen purposeful meetings in a day and where small, specific ideas can find cross-border partners. That is why the event has retained its influence even as the European conference circuit has grown: it is built for what Central and Eastern Europe actually needs, which is pragmatic collaboration.
As the 2025 forum enters its closing stretch, the real measure of success will be what leaves the mountain: memoranda that unlock financing for grid upgrades; university consortia that train the technicians and data scientists mid-cap firms cannot grow without; municipal partnerships that translate climate funds into warmer schools and cheaper bus fleets; procurement frameworks that give the region’s defense firms predictable demand; and a handful of new export deals born not from a press release but from a hallway conversation. In an era when Europe’s future will be assembled from many practical parts, Karpacz remains the workshop where Central and Eastern Europe brings those parts together.
