Purpose. The main goal of the presented paper is to highlight the effects of road infrastructure development on the economic growth and competitiveness of Slovak economy. We focused on the quality of the road network in the Slovak Republic (SR), in particular motorways and expressways. It is the density and the quality of the road infrastructure which primarily determine the competitiveness of the country. The paper also addresses the issue of expenditures and sources of funding related to road infrastructure in the Slovak Republic. In addition, we analyze the road infrastructure in relation to competitiveness and the inflow of foreign direct investments (FDI) to the Slovak Republic. Moreover, we look at the road infrastructure in relation to gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment.Methodology. We used the method of time series and correlation method when dealing with the subject matter and when analyzing the effects of road infrastructure development on the economic growth and increase of competitiveness of Slovak economy.The method of synthesis is used to draw conclusions and the method of comparison is used to compare general tendencies in the areas of road infrastructure, GDP and FDI. We use the time series analysis from 2000 until 2011 to examine the issues. Based on the analysis, we underscore the correlation between the GDP development and road infrastructure expenditures on the one hand and the inflow of foreign direct investments to the Slovak economy and its competitiveness on the other hand.The type of the article: Research report.

Stability of the financial system depends on the stability of its individual elements, banking system being the most important among them. In the today's competitive environment, Slovak banking sector consists of a large number of banks offering a wide range of services. For the banks operating in such environment it is not enough to distinguish themselves only through the parameters of products which are bringing short-term effects, but it is essential for them to build competitive advantage with some long-term perspective. The key contribution to a long-term strategy of any bank is assessment of its activities from the perspective of performance and efficiency. When analysing the actual situation, banks are trying to assess realistically their strengths and weaknesses regarding products, pricing, distribution, communication policy, bank management, organization structure etc. They assess their efficiency relative to other banks. For this purpose, banks use various methods seeking to find the most suitable combination of financial and non-financial assessment indicators. There are parametric and non-parametric methods for efficiency assessment. The most common method in the banking sector is the non-parametric method -Data Envelopment Analysis (or DEA models). It allows analyzing the efficiency of transformation of multiple inputs into multiple outputs with the help of efficiency score. In the paper, DEA models were employed to assess the efficiency of Slovak banking sector. The three largest banks at Slovak national banking market were found to be efficient in both analysed years. Slovenská sporiteľňa, a.s. was efficient in all the models with different combinations of inputs and outputs.

The objective of economic success is not only to achieve positive developments in economic indicators, but to ensure a high living standard and quality of life for the population. It is therefore necessary to measure economic success in terms of social and socio-economic indicators, which indicate the quality of life of the population. A relevant indicator of economic development and economic performance is the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Although this indicator is the most widely used, it has recently been subject to a wave of criticism. Therefore it is necessary to evaluate the economic success, taking into account other variables, which in themselves imply social indicators: net economic welfare, Human Development Index (HDI), Index of Competitiveness, Index of Economic Freedom (IEF), Prosperity Index, Corruption Perception Index and others. The subject of this article is to evaluate the economic performance of the Visegrad Group countries using GDP per capita and selected socioeconomic indicators. We use the method of time series analysis to examine the development of selected indicators. To compare their development we use the method of comparison, and to formulate the findings we use the method of synthesis. In order to evaluate the performance of the Visegrad countries we use scoring method. JEL CLASSIFICATIONSF14; F62; o11; o12 ARTICLE HISTORY

Research background: SMEs make up an important segment of the economic system, not only in the national economy, but also throughout the EU, and their importance continues to grow. SMEs in Slovakia, according to the latest data of the European Commission, represent 99.9 per cent of all enterprises, constitute 70.7 per cent of jobs, and 61.2 per cent of value added in the economy. However, they are often confronted with market imperfections. SMEs frequently have difficulties in obtaining capital or credit, particularly in the early start-up phase. Their restricted resources may also reduce access to new technologies or innovation. Authors often deal with the impact of SME financing on their development. Madrid-Guijarro et al. (2016), Lee et al. (2015) claim that SMEs have difficulty in funding innovation and the worsening in general credit conditions has been more pronounced for non-innovative firms.Purpose of the article: The main objective of the conducted research was to analyze the conditions for the development of small and medium enterprises (the SMEs sector) in Slovak Republic, whereas the specific objectives were: (1) to determine the terms for gaining external sources of financing for the development of SMEs, (2) to examine the resources for innovation development in the SMEs sector, (3) to find out if SMEs are considered to be a competitive advantage.Methods: The research was conducted in the Slovak Republic in 2016. Participants were 193 Slovak companies that were classified as SMEs by the size class of employment. The research tool used for the study was the own questionnaire consisting of 38 questions and the demographics. The structure of the questionnaire allowed the authors to identify the group of questions concerning the most important conditions for the development of the examined sector referring to the business environment. The results were processed by chi-square method.Findings & Value added: On the basis of the conducted research of the sector of SMEs , it can be concluded that a large group of companies have difficult access to external sources of financing and this refers both to the access to the European Union funds, grants, bank loans and other instruments of the financial market. However, it occurs that: (1) in Slovakia, the smaller the enterprise, i.e. the fewer employees it hires, the easier the access to external sources of financing, (1) innovative projects are realized from company profits or a loan, (1) problems in Slovakia in accessing external funds due to the complexity of the process of approval of applications and documents and strict criteria for the assessment of financial capacity.

Climate change and awareness of the need to care for the environment have resulted in a global increase in the interest in renewable energy sources. The European Union (EU) is active in this respect and requires Member States to fulfill specific plans in the transformation of their energy systems. We employed hierarchical cluster analysis in an attempt to distinguish those countries among the new EU Member States that increased their electrical capacity from renewable energy sources to the greatest extent while paying attention to their energy intensity. The analyses were conducted in two scenarios for both 2004 and 2016. The first scenario assumed an analysis of all known renewable energy sources, whereas in the second scenario, only renewable energy sources from wind and solar power plants were included. The division of analyses into these two variants showed the importance of the differences in the energy assessment of individual countries, depending on classification of renewable energy sources. We identified groups of countries where electrical capacity from renewable energy sources increased the most. Conducting analyses using two variants allowed distinguishing countries that based most of their renewable energy on modern renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power plants. The inclusion of gross domestic product in the analyses allowed us to identify countries with the worst energy efficiency value.