SLOVAKIA’S GPD rose by 1.5 percent in the last quarter of 2013, the Statistics Office (ŠÚ) announced, confirming its flash estimate from February.
GDP increased 1.1 percentage points faster in the fourth quarter of 2013 than in the same period of 2012. In the quarter-on-quarter comparison, Slovakia’s economy grew by 0.4 percent.
The volume of GDP in common prices increased to €18.393 billion, which is a 1.5 percent rise, according to the ŠÚ.
Economic growth for the whole of 2013 thus stood at 0.9 percent, which is slower compared to the previous year, by 0.9 percentage points. In 2013, Slovakia’s GDP totalled €72.134 billion.
A notable change was seen in the make-up of economic growth in the final quarter of 2013, which had been expected, UniCredit Bank’s analyst Ľubomír Koršňák said.
“In contrast with the previous quarters, domestic demand did not continue to slow down economic growth, for the first time since mid-2011,” Koršňák wrote in a memo.
On the contrary, domestic demand was among the main factors driving GDP growth, as it increased in all of its main areas in year-on-year terms: in consumption of households, government consumption and in investments.
On the other hand, exports, which were almost the only source of economic growth in the previous quarters, did not contribute much to GDP growth in the last quarter of 2013 (contributing just 0.1 percentage point), according to Koršňák.
While in the previous nine quarters economic growth was affected only by foreign demand, in the last quarter of 2013 domestic demand also contributed to the positive developments. While foreign demand dropped by 1.6 percentage points year-on-year to 6.6 percent, the pace of the rise in imported goods and services accelerated by 2.9 percentage points to 7.4 percent.
