When acquiring foreign direct investment, efforts should be made to increase the share of FDI with a greater proportion of the so-called higher technology, especially in manufacturing with a sophisticated type of production, and place emphasis on the participation of domestic subcontractors, including research and development services. An intensive inflow of FDI should bring a substantial growth in productivity, but it has to be assured that by increasing its market share, conditions are being created for a rise in employment. The enterprise sector in particular should endeavour to assure this. Price increases should respect the real circumstances, especially social acceptability. If prices increased to the level in neighbouring EU member states faster than the possibilities for pay rises made possible by increased labour productivity, then real wages and the population's living standard might decline.

On the contrary, if we succumbed to wage pressures and wages increased faster than productivity, the competitiveness of enterprises would deteriorate, resulting in redundancies in enterprises and rise in unemployment. It is also necessary to overcome the instability of regional policy institutions, which are manifested by the absence of a regional development planning system with a good legislative, institutional and financial basis, and, subsequently, in the low utilisation of financial resources from EU pre-accession and structural funds. In this respect, a national regional development planning and guidance system needs to be build, able to convincingly show the knowledge of its own needs based on elaborated concepts and, at the same time, effectively utilise structural assistance, so that the synergy effect is achieved. This requires the completion of the institutional framework in such a way that no parallel institutional structures for the use of own and external funding develop. Since there is the threat of a lack of quality projects, a pragmatic solution would be to concentrate the capacity of already functioning implementing units on the preparation of a smaller number of large, investment intensive projects, oriented mainly on the restructuring and development of regions' production potential, improvement of their accessibility and the completion of the technical infrastructure in their territories. In view of the difficulties in the acquisition of budgetary finance for the co-financing of structural operations carried out with assistance from pre-accession funds and, after accession to the European Union, structural funds, the Government (Ministry of Finance of the SR) needs to elaborate a realistic long-term system of co-financing.

The optimal use of resources from structural funds requires greater attention to the preparation of the relevant projects, training of the responsible staff at the relevant levels (especially within self-governing regions) and permanent attention to strict financial control.