Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)

4. Towns in Slovakia after 1993

Towns in Slovakia after 1993

tied, highly-educated intellectual specialists, rather than merely its higher number of inhabitants or buildings. Their everyday needs can best be met by urban services. This layer, which manages service providing companies and plays an important part in decision-making and preparing the decisions, has a much stronger ability to enforce their interests than the working class of former years. In most cases, the locating of a leading service-providing company depends on which settlement its management chooses. This can be seen in Bratislava’s outstanding situation and this indicates that Košice is of minor importance, because only seven companies have moved there. Apparently, Kosice’s plans to open to the east have not achieved the expected results, yet, although Slovak company expansion towards Ukraine and Romania could best be organized from there.

Table 34. Comparison of industrial and service-providing companies

Industry

Services

settlement

number

income

number

income

Industry/services, %

Žilina

3

7,016,887

3

19,801,743

35.4

Košice

6

11,266,048

7

18,074,216

62.3

Banská Bystrica

1

1,409,858

1

1,628,651

86.6

Bratislava

30

346,365,84947

243,712,475

142.1

Nitra

3

7,187,4064

1,708,739

420.6

Prešov

2

3,351,869

1

523,311

640.5

Liptovský Mikuláš

1

1,035,784

1

143,429

722.2

Humenné

6

9,302,340

1

1,169,377

795.5

Trnava

4

8,609,415

1

376,244

2,288.3

Spišská Nová Ves

2

6,066,502

1

208,552

2,908.9

_____I

58

401,611,958

67

287.346,737

139.8

Source: the author's own calculations

When the incomes of the industrial and service-providing companies located in one town or city and listed by the analysis centre are compiled in one table (Table 34), it turns out that the 58 industrial companies have an income 39.8% higher than that of the 67 service providing units. If we regard the order by the ratio of the two sectors, we can see that in Žilina, Košice and Banská Bystrica services play a more important role, whereas in Spišská Nová Ves, Trnava and Humenné the traditional industrial activities are predominant. Since TREND analysis centre published a table that did not include all the companies of the whole sectoral system, we should be careful when stating that the increasing importance of services is a characteristic feature of the fast developing Slovak economy, whose obviously most outstanding scenes are towns.

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