The article presents the analysis of the factors which affected the level of the zloty exchange rate in the period from 1990 to 2002. For this purpose, the administrative and legal solutions have been presented as well as the econometric model (the so-called balance of payments equilibrium exchange rate model) which came to be applied as the basis in the measurement of the dependencies between the real exchange rate and the macroeconomic variables. Next, on the basis of the model, which can be included into the group of behavioural models of the equilibrium exchange rate, an exchange rate cohesive with the short-term external equilibrium was set.

The article has been divided into the following parts: section one and two present the evolution of the exchange rate system and the general outline of the zloty exchange rate in the period from 1989 to 2002. Section three offers a description of the balance of payments equilibrium model. In the section four, the model is compared to other selected exchange rate models. Section five describes the construction of the variable observation sequences used to estimate the parameters of the model, while section six presents the results of the estimation. The article ends with a summary of the results and their interpretation and discusses possible directions for the development and application of the method it describes.