All is not well in the Visegrad economies by Simon Tilford
On the face of it, the Visegrad countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – are doing well economically. The data for GDP per head suggest a gradual convergence in living standards with Western Europe. They continue to attract a disproportionate share of inward investment in EU manufacturing, and their integration into EU-wide supply chains helps to explain why they are now collectively Germany’s most important trade partner, ahead of China and the US. But the political situation across the Visegrad is anything but rosy. Voters in all four countries have succumbed to populists. The reasons for this populism are complex, but economics probably provides a bigger part of the explanation than the positive headline numbers suggest. In 2016, GDP per head in the Visegrad four (adjusted for price differences) ranged from 64 per cent of eurozone levels in Poland to 82 per cent in the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland have experienced significant convergence in GDP per head with the eurozone over the last ten years (though it should be noted that the dire performance of the eurozone economy over that period was a major reason for this). But what matters to the average person is not GDP growth, but personal income growth, and hence living standards. And here the Visegrad picture is less reassuring. In 2016 worker ‘compensation’ (wages and salaries and other benefits) ranged from just 50 per cent of the eurozone’s in Hungary to 59 per cent in the Czech Republic. And the rate of convergence of compensation with the eurozone average has been slower than the rate of convergence of GDP.
Growth in consumption across the Visegrad countries has lagged behind growth in GDP, resulting in a sharp fall in consumption as a share of overall spending. This has happened in nearly all developed economies over the last decade, but the scale of the decline in all four Visegrad economies has been much greater. Average households have not seen enough of the fruits of economic growth. Those rewards have gone disproportionately to the owners of capital, and in these countries, that tends to mean foreigners. In the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, the most important sectors are largely or wholly foreign-owned. The Polish economy is much bigger and more diversified than the other three, but the level of foreign ownership is still very high. The IMF expects modest convergence of Slovak GDP per head with the eurozone over the next