WHAT  TO  DO WITH  A  DEFORMED  STRUCTURE  OF  OUR  ECONOMY? Cover Image

Čo s deformovanou štruktúrou našej ekonomiky?
WHAT TO DO WITH A DEFORMED STRUCTURE OF OUR ECONOMY?

Author(s): Jozef Sojka
Subject(s): Economy
Published by: SAV - Slovenská akadémia vied - Ekonomický ústav SAV a Prognostický ústav SAV

Summary/Abstract: The author of the study analyzed the structure of the Slovak economy : a) in production and services sphere; b) in demand production (focused on household consumption, state administration consumption, investments, stock increases, exports and imports); c) from the point of view of the supply in the industrial structure. The economy structure development in the sphere of services and production is keeping line with overall world development tendencies. At the beginning of economic transformation during nineties services in Slovakia were growing faster due to the shift from the central economy to the market economy where establishing various services to satisfy the needs of the market economy was a must, e.g. banking and insurance ser-vices, auditing and legal counselling, etc. In subsequent years the volume of services in the economic structure has been growing affected by similar motivation like in western economies. This tendency has been strengthened mainly due to informatization which had penetrated into all segments of the economy and has still been accelerating. A pos-sible distortion in the volume of services may be linked with pricing. A considerably high volume of service prices have not been market driven, these prices are too high to compare with production prices affected by market conditions. However, the range of such distortion is not very high to reverse the ratio of GDP volume created in produc-tion / in services. The demand structure of our economy has been so far strongly growth oriented. It can be seen on the whole demand structure, but mainly on the ratio of investments or gross fix capital increases or households’ consumption. Houseuseholds’ consumption in our economy is less than 50% of GDP, investments represent more than 40% of GDP. To compare these data with industrially developed countries there is a paradox and the author of the article attempted to provide explanation on investment and household consumption evaluating process. Pro-growth orientation of our economy was supported by foreign loans and their total volume reached as of the end of 1998 USD 12,2 bn. These loans flew not only to promote investment, but were also used for household consumption. A consumption in personal cars raised (74 583 cars were sold in 1996) at the expense of household con-struction. Increasing the loan burden for the future should not develop at this rate thus creating a constrain in the pro-growth structure of our economy. Our analyses attempted to explain the pro-growth orientation of the Slovak economy structure from the point of view of GDP distribution where more resources have been oriented to economic activities supporting the economic growth. This tendency, how-ever, mainly due to the investment structure, has not been bringing an acceleration of the economic growth, and, since the efficiency of investment had been low, the growth rate decreased.

  • Issue Year: 47/1999
  • Issue No: 03
  • Page Range: 456-469
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Slovak
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