SUMMARY

The energy intensity of East-Central Europe has greatly improved in the last two decades for two main reasons. The first is that after the change of regime the heavy industry collapsed, and there was a shift from agriculture towards the service sector, while the second is the technological development of the economy, which increased the energy efficiency of the economic sectors. The subject of this paper is to provide a comprehensive index decomposition analysis of the energy intensity of the economy in four East-Central European nations (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland and Hungary) between 1990 and 2009.