International competitiveness of Slovak industry and the process of acceding to the European Union

The problem of international competitiveness of economies is currently very frequented not only in economically developed economies, but also in countries transforming their economies into a market system. Whereas in the developed countries the progress in competitiveness is related to the evolving process of globalization, in transitional economies level and structure gaps in competitiveness are added, mainly in industry as the main branch of economy. At the beginning the author of the paper stresses the importance of this problem mainly in connection with the efforts of transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe to integrate themselves into the European Union (EU), and in connection with the tasks following from Agenda 2000 and which will yet follow from the documents of Partnership for Entrance. The paper further substantiates the validity of understanding the concept of competitiveness not only on the enterprise level, but also on higher layers - branch and national levels. In this context the author casts no doubt on productivity as an indicator of competitiveness, stresses also the influence of the branch structure on competitiveness and endorses an opinion preferring a multicriteria evaluation of competitiveness. Main attention is paid to the evaluation of competitiveness of the Slovak industry. The author has chosen for this purpose a non-traditional methodical apparatus that enables measuring quantitatively qualitative aspects of industry's competitiveness. The competitiveness of industry is analyzed by the branch groups defined by the character of source intensity, phases of technological progress and courses of production use. Each group of branches is evaluated by 7 selected indicators on the basis of comparison with small economically developed West European countries. The analysis disclosed important differences in the model of competitiveness between Slovakia and these small economically developed West European countries. Slovakia is more competitive in labour and capital intensive products, mostly designed for production consumption, and on the other side low competitiveness manifests itself in more sophisticated products based on research and qualified labour intended for final use. A further important finding is that Slovak exports are supported above all only by price competitiveness, which is not based on comparative cost advantage, but mainly on currency devaluation. Qualitative competitiveness is therefore less noticeable. The author therefore stresses that an inseparable dimension of future economic growth and the transformation process must be the growth of competitiveness based on more consistent product and technology innovations. That will obviously demand also reappraisal of the current industrial policy aiming at its transformation into the policy of competitiveness.