IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/prg/jnlrst/v2011y2011i2id33p25-31.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The automotive industry crisis as a determinant of regional unemployment growth in Slovakia and Hungary in 2008-2009

Author

Listed:
  • Karel Hostomský
  • Jan Ženka

Abstract

Slovakia and Hungary provide good examples of export-oriented countries with small domestic markets, which are heavily dependent on foreign capital. Excessive orientation on the automotive industry and supplying industries (especially in the case of Slovakia) and high level of geographic concentration of (mostly greenfi eld) production/ assembly plants into the western parts of both countries make their regional labor markets vulnerable at times of economic crisis. Neither Slovakia nor Hungary were specialised on the automotive industry in the period of socialism and thus were not able to offer an industrial tradition, pool of skilled labor force and dense network of suppliers to the extent like Czechia was. Therefore, it was generally expected that their industrial centres will be seriously threatened by plant closures and relocations of production abroad as soon as they start to loose cost-based competitive advantage. However, automotive industries in these countries exhibited surprisingly strong resistance to the recent economic slowdown. With the exception of metropolitan Bratislavsky region all Slovak regions experienced either stagnation or even increase in the automotive employment. Although Hungarian automotive industry had been seriously damaged by crisis and signifi cantly contributed to increases in unemployment especially in the most developed regions in the northwestern part of country, few large scale bankruptcies were reported. Automotive industry didn´t signifi cantly alter the traditional regional pattern of unemployment in Slovakia and Hungary. Geographical proximity to the Western European markets, large capital investments, relatively skilled and cheap labor force seem to favor maintaining production activities in Central European countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Karel Hostomský & Jan Ženka, 2011. "The automotive industry crisis as a determinant of regional unemployment growth in Slovakia and Hungary in 2008-2009," Regionální studia, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2011(2), pages 25-31.
  • Handle: RePEc:prg:jnlrst:v:2011:y:2011:i:2:id:33:p:25-31
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.vse.cz/rst/33
    Download Restriction: free of charge
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:prg:jnlrst:v:2011:y:2011:i:2:id:33:p:25-31. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Stanislav Vojir (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/uevsecz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.