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 als o in countries transforming their economies into a market system. Wher eas in the developed countries the progress in competitiveness is rela ted to the evolving process of globalization, in transitional economie s level and structure gaps in competitiveness are added, mainly in ind ustry as the main branch of economy. At the beginning the author of th e paper stresses the importance of this problem mainly in connection w ith the efforts of transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europ e to integrate themselves into the European Union (EU), and in connect ion with the tasks following from Agenda 2000 and which will yet follo w from the documents of Partnership for Entrance. The paper further su bstantiates the validity of understanding the concept of competitivene ss not only on the enterprise level, but also on higher layers - branc h and national levels. In this context the author casts no doubt on pr oductivity as an indicator of competitiveness, stresses also the influ ence of the branch structure on competitiveness and endorses an opinio n preferring a multicriteria evaluation of competitiveness. Main atten tion is paid to the evaluation of competitiveness of the Slovak indust ry. The author has chosen for this purpose a non-traditional methodica l apparatus that enables measuring quantitatively qualitative aspects of industry's competitiveness. The competitiveness of industry is anal yzed 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 countrie s. The analysis disclosed important differences in the model of compet itiveness between Slovakia and these small economically developed West European countries. Slovakia is more competitive in labour and capita l intensive products, mostly designed for production consumption, and on the other side low competitiveness manifests itself in more sophist icated products based on research and qualified labour intended for fi nal use. A further important finding is that Slovak exports are suppor ted above all only by price competitiveness, which is not based on com parative cost advantage, but mainly on currency devaluation. Qualitati ve competitiveness is therefore less noticeable. The author therefore stresses that an inseparable dimension of future economic growth and t he transformation process must be the growth of competitiveness based on more consistent product and technology innovations. That will obvio usly demand also reappraisal of the current industrial policy aiming a t its transformation into the policy of competitiveness.