Development trends in the structure of the Slovak economy

During the economic transformation, the Slovak economy came closer to sectoral structure of tile economy of the developed countries of the European Union. The share of services both in employement and in GDP increased and the share of all the production sectors decreased proportionally. The increase of GDP was, to the large extent, due to the increase of the value added in services. To a certain extent it is questionable if such a development creates favourable preconditions for further acceleration of economic growth in the next period of time. In industry, different performance of individual sectors in foreign markets led to the outstanding increase of share of the sectors with a lower rate of value added and extraordinarily dependent upon import of raw materials, energy and semi-products. The increasing production of these industries which enabled a more rational utilization of the disposable production factors and so to obtain increasing returns to scale resulted also in gradual improvement of parameters of their efficiency in the years of 1994 and 1995. It seems to be possible to expect that the production structure in the given group Of sectors will gradually change into a more sofisticated and obviously even more diversified one. This direction of the structural move in industry may be taken for one of three major trends. The second direction-and it should be mostly supported by industrial policy-is marked by overcoming the backwardness felt in those industrial sectors that are oriented towards a more sophisticated production but, because of different reasons, they are not able to make themselves felt not only in foreign markets but in domestic markets as well, and even to a greater extent. This structural move tendency must also admit that some of the production units are not perspective any more. For the third trend of structural move in industry, which is inevitable for further development of the economy, may be taken the establishment of some new production units in cooperation with great international companies. These companies should play in the economy a role of certain new development poles which would positively influence even the further industrial branches or even services, namely by their external effects revealed.