Abstract (may include machine translation)
Although membership in the European Union (EU) looked like a distant dream to many Slovaks in the 1990s, a remarkable political and economic makeover around the turn of the millennium enabled Slovakia to join the EU in 2004, along with seven other Central-Eastern European countries. EU accession caught Slovakia on a trajectory of population aging and demographic decline. The fertility rate was and still stands significantly below the replacement rate, and the old-age dependency ratio is projected to rise to over 60% by 2060, marking one of the highest figures among the EU member states (Eurostat 2012). Immigration remains low, standing at around 1% of the population in 2011, and cannot be expected to sufficiently compensate for these demographic trends in the foreseeable future. The labor market still has not fully absorbed the structural imbalances originating from the pre-1989 command economy. We are grateful to the participants of the 5th IZA/CEUR Workshop on ‘EU Enlargement and the Labor Markets: Migration, Crisis and Adjustment in an Enlarged E(M)U II’ the anonymous referee as well as the editors of this volume for providing a number of suggestions that helped to improve the chapter significantly. We thank the Slovak Statistical Office for providing the Slovak Labor Force Survey data. Any remaining errors are ours. Martin Kahanec acknowledges the financial support of the Eduworks Marie Curie Initial Network Training Project (PITN-GA-2013-608311) of the European Commission’s 7th Framework Program.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Labor Migration, EU Enlargement, and the Great Recession |
Publisher | Springer Berlin Heidelberg |
Pages | 189-218 |
Number of pages | 30 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9783662453209 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783662453193 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Jan 2016 |