Land and Building Taxes in the Republic of Slovakia

Abstract

Slovak culture and traditions have developed in the shadows of the country’s neighbors: the Czech lands and Austria to the west, Hungary to the south, Poland to the north, and Ukraine to the east. Freed from Hungarian occupation at the end of World War I, Slovakia shared federal status with the Czechs as part of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1993.¹ A Slovak state was established under Nazi tutelage in March 1939 (Wolchik, 1991, p. 13). When World War II ended, democracy made a faltering new beginning, and the federation continued into the period when the communists seized power. Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet bloc as a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

The original article that became this chapter was Phillip J. Bryson and Gary C. Cormia with Soňa Čapková and Miloš Konček (2001), “Land and Building Taxes in the Republic of Slovakia,” in The Development of Property Taxation in Economies in Transition: Case Studies from Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Jane Malme and Joan Youngman (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank), pp. 51–66. Copyright permission for republication was given by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Bank. The original article has become dated with respect to a few details. In a discussion of Slovakia’s cadastre, for example, one could correctly observe in about 2000, at the time of writing, that it was in need of some work. Since that time, of course, cadastral progress has been significant. Moreover, the original paper did not take notice of organizational changes (especially of plans to implement a public administration reform) in Slovakia that were then still largely in the planning stage. The dramatic changes that reform would bring about are addressed in later chapters, which will document how the Slovak reforms continued to develop.