Trade in services and tertiarisation of the Visegrád Four economies

After several decades of planned economy and manufacturing-oriented economic policy, during the last 20 years the Visegrád Four (V4) countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) have been experiencing a shift towards a market economy combined with intensification of services activity. This has resulted in increasing participation in international services trade and in becoming an important destination for services foreign direct investment. In addition to analysis of the changes services trade has been experiencing in the V4 countries, the objective of this article is to investigate whether a parallel process of tertiarisation has been taking place. In other words, we aim to find out whether the V4 production systems have been intensifying the employment of services intermediate inputs.