SLOVAKIA ON THE ROAD TOWARDS THE EU KNOWLEDGE BASED ECONOMY

The European Union has passed a complicated period. Its economy lags not only behind its own development goals, but in many developing indicators, it lags well behind the results achieved by its economic partners and competitors, the USA and Japan. Due to the lower competitiveness in the international market environment there are growing problems in the domestic labour market. For a long time, many EU countries demonstrated relatively high unemployment leading subsequently to weakening the income situation of households and consequently to social tensions in society. The labor market situations of young graduates and also people approaching retirement age and seniors are particularly worrying. In the context of such arguments the strategy of perspective development of the European Union 2020 known as the EUROPE 2020 strategy was born. Its essence is the formulation of objectives and procedures to enable to “build in the area of the EU the strongest and most effective economic grouping of the world, able to absorb and eliminate negative stimuli from the external market environment in order to protect the quality of life of its inhabitants.“ According to J. Barroso, Europe 2020 is “the strategy for growth for the future decades, which must ensure building the European Union as an area of knowledge based, constantly growing and inclusively functioning economy“. The paper confronts the EU strategic objectives of 2020 with the current economic and social conditions under the EU and Slovakia´s environment as a precondition for their successful fulfillment. The situation in the current Slovak labour market is used as a pointer to the neglected national labour policy tools, which could create significant barriers in realization of the EU 2020 goals. The initially presented data will be used for building the econometric model enabling the in-depth analysis of relation between the explanatory variables and the newly generated economic and social parameters in the EU and Slovakia.