Ashoka University

Motor vehicle production in the Visegrád Four economies (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) has undergone a profound structural transformation since their EU accession. This transformation has unfolded along two fronts: ever-deepening integration into European and global value chains, and, more recently, the industry's shift to electrification. This paper examines both over 2010–2023. We test a prominent claim in the recent literature: that since 2018, global value chains have been reshoring, regionalising and shortening in response to pandemic disruption and geopolitical risk. Decomposing Eurostat FIGARO input-output tables and measuring production-chain length, we find no support for reshoring, shortening or derisking: backward linkage and chain length both rose in every country; where domestic sourcing increased, it was not matched by additional domestically generated value; and diversification away from EU suppliers occurred alongside longer, not shorter, chains. Testing a monthly Comext series on lithium-ion battery imports for structural breaks, we find the EV transition offers no exception: battery-import growth and break timing diverge sharply by country, tracking individual firm investments more closely than EU or national policy. These findings are consistent with the Dependent Market Economy framework, which predicts persistent foreign dependence rather than upgrading. But the four countries do not follow one shared trajectory. Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary form a cluster of increasingly import-dependent assembly platforms with lengthening, internationalising chains, while Poland retains a structurally deeper domestic base than the other three, though this gap narrows as all four countries' chains internationalise. The paper's central contribution is to show that a shared institutional exposure to foreign capital does not imply a shared national trajectory, and that treating the V4 as a single regional production platform obscures the differentiated way dependence is deepening within it.