ABSTRACT
The economy of the Slovak Republic appears at first sight to present as many paradoxes as its political development. When Czechoslovakia split at the end of 1992, there were expectations that Slovakia’s prosperity would soon decline when it was no longer propped up by the more advanced Czech Lands. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century, EU statistics showed that while Czechs were indeed some 25 per cent better off than Slovaks, the Slovaks still enjoyed a standard of living which was nearly a quarter higher than that of their northern neighbours, the Poles.1 Although the Mecˇiar governments which ruled for most of the 1990s were considered laggards in the area of economic reform in comparison with the Czechs, and even more so the Poles, they produced surprisingly good macroeconomic indicators in spite of miserably low foreign direct investment. However, Mecˇiar left his successors with a difficult economic legacy, and GDP growth rates appeared to sink immediately after he left office,2 while the country was slower in shedding its invisibility to the eyes of foreign investors. Slovakia’s consistently high unemployment rate – a bone of contention even at the time of the Czechoslovak split – also rose to be the worst of all the applicants for membership of the EU at the beginning of the new millennium.3 Nevertheless, the Bratislava region was still as prosperous as the average EU member state, and although the government was concerned by worrying economic variations between the different regions of Slovakia, in some respects it had an admirably consistent basic infrastructure. A drive round even the remote rural roads in the hills of the east, in direct proximity to the Ukrainian border, presented the motorist with none of the horrors of the pothole-strewn highways in the Romanian countryside.
