Few countries succeed as discreetly as Slovenia does. The low profile rather flatters the place, but capital follows attention, not modesty.
Of Europe’s smaller countries, it’s arguably Estonia that these days gets the most attention. Its digital society is by now world-renowned, a model for digitalisation from Mongolia to Costa Rica. Politically it punches above its weight too, not least as former prime minister Kaja Kallas is now the European Union’s foreign policy chief, a high profile role indeed.
Far less gets written about Slovenia. The country barely features in international media, economically forgotten, with even parliamentary and presidential elections passing without so much as a mention. This is a shame. According to World Bank Open Data, Slovenia features a highly developed, export-oriented economy (exports accounted for 78.6 per cent of GDP in 2025) with a GDP of roughly 66 billion euros. It boasts a strong GDP per capita of around 30,000 euros and maintains robust economic fundamentals: unemployment and inflation are low, growth is steady if far from spectacular. Labour productivity in Slovenia meanwhile sits at around 86 per cent of the EU average, indicating that the country continues to converge gradually with more advanced economies.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of mostly rich countries, last week published its latest economic survey of Slovenia, acknowledging its progress while also suggesting that sustaining growth will require strengthening public finances, boosting investment, enhancing resilience to trade shocks and harnessing the opportunities offered by AI.
As a highly open economy, the OECD notes, Slovenia has benefited significantly from trade, with exports playing a key role in its economic success. In the context of elevated trade tensions and heightened geopolitical uncertainty, Slovenia should further strengthen trade resilience by diversifying its imports and facilitating trade, including through enhanced co-operation among state trade agencies, the survey suggests.
AI adoption in Slovenia is relatively high, though concentrated among larger, more productive and digitally advanced firms. Broadening AI adoption could generate significant productivity gains and support long-term growth. Expanding workforce upskilling programmes, including through a broader reskilling strategy, would help accelerate AI adoption. Attracting skilled foreign workers would also ease labour and skills shortages. In 2024, Slovenia received just 26,000 new immigrants on a long-term or permanent basis, down 16 per cent compared to 2023.
Shallow capital markets meanwhile continue to weigh on investment and long-term growth, limiting firms’ access to financing, particularly for innovative start-ups. High household savings remain concentrated in real estate and bank deposits, while private pensions and other institutional investors play only a limited role in capital markets. Encouraging greater competition in financial markets, reducing tax incentives for property investment and broadening private-funded pensions would help channel more savings towards productive investment. Reducing public ownership in the insurance sector and easing excessive regulatory barriers in services professions would also support investment and stronger long-term growth.
Hiding in plain sight
In January 2017 Samo and Iza Login sold Outfit7, the Ljubljana studio behind the Talking Tom apps, for about one billion US dollars. By then the talking-cat franchise had been downloaded in more than 200 countries, the buyers were a Chinese consortium, and the headquarters stayed where it was. Almost none of the fame attached to the country that built it. Outfit7’s games have since passed 25 billion downloads, still made in Ljubljana.
Ivo Boscarol started Pipistrel in 1989 in Ajdovščina, a border town of fewer than 7,000 people, building powered hang-gliders with a handful of friends. The firm kept moving up-market. In 2020 its Velis Electro became the first electric aircraft anywhere to win full type certification from the European Union’s safety regulator. Boscarol sold the company to Textron, an American conglomerate, in April 2022 for 218 million euros, and it still assembles aircraft in Ajdovščina and over the border in Italy.
Slovenia adopted the euro in January 2007 and joined the OECD in 2010, with little fanfare either time. Much of the economy runs on work that rarely makes headlines. Renault has assembled cars at Novo Mesto since the early 1990s; Krka, a drugmaker a short walk from the same plant, ships generics across Europe and the former Soviet states. Both are profitable and almost unknown outside their own trades.
Whether the quiet costs anything is the question Isabell Koske, OECD deputy director of country studies, kept returning to in Ljubljana when presenting her survey. Inward foreign direct investment stood at 34.6 per cent of GDP in 2023, below most economies of Slovenia’s size, and the state still owns about a quarter of the economy, one of the larger shares in the European Union. Slovenia knows what it has to do: privatise more and deepen the shallow capital markets that starve younger firms of finance. More skilled workers need to be coaxed in from abroad. It will probably do just that, with, as usual, the minimum of fuss and fanfare.
Photo: Dreamstime.