Perhaps one of Slovakia's saving graces was that is was still suffering to some extent the effects of poor infrastructure from its days when it was a province of Hungary. The Slovaks were kind of used to being a little poor.

There was a T-72 tank factory in Zilina. For years, it had a hard time collecting money from its best customer (Iraq). When Vaclav Havel had a good part in shutting this factory down (by refusing further subsidies), the seeds of Slovak separation sprouted. For a short time, this factory went in the direction of trying make tracked-wheel tractors, but going from tanks to bulldozers was too big of an engineering challenge. Many good-paying jobs were lost.

I had some contact with the Slovak agricultural industry. When I compared notes of Slovak farms to my mixed farm experience in Canada, the Slovaks had 10 farm employees to Canada's 1. A lot of farm workers became unemployed when subsidies ended. But I think there is something in the Slovak nature that allowed them overcome this challenge without becoming too resentful. Many found other jobs.

And I would say that the separation from the Czech Republic also helped. The Slovaks no longer had anyone to blame.

There still was a lot of corruption as state enterprises were sold off. Organized crime was a big part of that economy in Slovakia at that time.

I see the employment dislocation as a necessary step to transform this economy. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, having those three auto companies come into Slovakia really helped.

It was the corruption of state enterprises that should have been handled better. Three luxury hotels (by communist standards) in Piestany went to three different mafias.

The Czech Republic tried to prevent this kind of corruption by an interesting sell-off process. Each citizen got shares in all state enterprises, to which they had to exchange for shares in mutual funds. Then the mutual fund managers played games amongst themselves, trading shares of the former state enterprises. So each mutual fund evolved differently.

The biggest fund became quite "profitable". Its CEO was paid a wage equivalent of its profit. Then this firm relocated to the Carribean, taking advantage of a tax haven. There was a warrant for the CEO, but he was living near his new bank. Laws were kind of wild west in those days. It would be interesting to see how much money the average citizen got from from the Czech corporate re-structuring.