Both Austria and Slovakia are located in the Central European region – they are part of the Central European family. As a matter of fact, Austria has made effective use of this location in the two decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain. It has become one of the most important investors in its Central European neighbours. Austria's economic links to Slovakia are especially strong, not least because of the short distance between the two capitals, Vienna and Bratislava. Today both countries are also members of the euro area, which strengthens their relationship even further.

The euro was a milestone of European integration (Nowotny, 2010). Against the background of the global financial crisis, it seems to be the right time to discuss and reflect on the euro's development from both a European perspective and from a global angle. In the early stages of its existence, the euro was under heavy criticism. The well-known argument of proponents of the optimum currency area (OCA) theory associates the costs of joining a monetary union with the loss of domestic monetary policy, the well-known argument that ‘one size cannot fit all’. Certainly, a currency union becomes costly if the business cycles of its member countries are not synchronised and if domestic adjustment capabilities are limited. In the absence of country-specific monetary policies, an idiosyncratic shock cannot be absorbed through the real exchange rate but has to be digested via flexible wages, fiscal transfers and mobile factors of production.