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The Publishing House of the Economic Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i., is launching a new publication by author Karol Morvay entitled The Economy of Slovakia between Two Thresholds.

At first glance, the current state of the economy after more than three decades of "independent" existence and more than two decades of being part of the EU appears to be a success: it has demonstrated its ability to maintain stability and, in certain periods, to grow strongly; it has changed its structure from a supplier of cheap semi-finished products to a producer of sophisticated products; and it has changed the use of human labour to such an extent that it now has a shortage of it. At first glance, it is a success story; the system apparently works. But on closer inspection, there is a contradiction: the economy resembles standard Western European economies in its functioning, but at a certain point it is no longer able to approach their performance. This book addresses this contradiction in a scientifically popularising approach. It attempts to explain how, after overcoming its first fictitious developmental threshold (when it changed to a standard market economy), the economy got stuck at the second threshold (it lost momentum in catching up with more advanced economies). It attempts to approach this problem from three perspectives. From the dimension of productivity convergence, from the dimension of structural transformation of the economy, and from the dimension of labour and human resource utilization. These three perspectives see different phenomena, but they complement each other. Their significant common factor is a failure to respond to turning points and a continuation of thinking and policies that should already have been replaced.

Edited: Katarína Štrauchová