Since May 2004 is the Slovak Republic a member of the EU, thus the development of its industry has to be shaped by trends of these of EU. To remove the existing gap between SR and the most developed EU countries the presence of a strong and competitive manufacturing sector is crucial. The main aspiration of the submitted paper, which was supported by Science and Technology Assistance Agency under the contract No. APVT-51-023602 is to compare the Slovak industry, in particular it's manufacturing defined as NACE 15 - 36 industries with selected 8 small EU economies - Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands and Sweden according to transition to the information society.
The paper evaluates the qualitative aspects of the Czech Republic position in the global economic flows in terms of their knowledge intensity. The stress is being put on structural characteristics of value-added, FDI and R&D and the innovation activities indicating the change of competitive advantage towards the increasing role of internal innovation capacity and unique product and processes. This change, however, may not be fast enough to compensate for weakening cost-based competitiveness. Despite the increasing share of FDI companies in domestic R&D activities, their average knowledge intensity remains low. The prevailing competitive strategy relies on adoption of foreign technology knowledge to local needs, possibly with minor adjustments.
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