THE IMPLEMENTATION OF STRUCTURAL REFORMS IN SLOVENIA AND READINESS TO THE NEW ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CRISIS

The last economic and financial crisis from 2008 to 2014 hit Slovenia harder than most other EU Member States. The aim of the paper was to find out in which state Slovenia emerged from the crisis and to determine the current situation with the help of secondary sources. We compared Slovenia with seven EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Eastern Europe, which were most similar to our former political and economic system and which joined the EU in the same year as Slovenia (Czech Republic Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). We analysed the main socio-economic aspects of the development and on this basis we drew conclusions and guidelines for the future development of Slovenia. We paid special attention to innovation and technological development and examined them in more detail. We used indicators from the international statistical database and data from international surveys to make a comparison between Slovenia and comparable EU Member States from the EU-28 CEE and the EU-28 average. We found that despite accelerating economic growth over the last five years, Slovenia has not eliminated most of its structural deficits and macroeconomic imbalances. To sum up, given the above-average GDP growth, driven mainly by increased foreign demand, Slovenia has forgotten that economic expansion is a cyclical phenomenon and will therefore run out of time for structural changes that will contribute to sustainable and stable economic growth.