Environmental infrastructure as a tool of the Slovakia population living standards raising financed by EU funds

Purpose: Presented paper deals with the environmental infrastructure in the field of water management, especially with the analysis of the possibilities of obtaining funds from the European Union to ensure the implementation of projects, namely construction of public water supply, public sewerage and wastewater treatment in municipalities to increase living standards. The level of the environmental infrastructure in the field of water management speaks of the quality of life of the population, their living standards. Design/methodology/approach: To achieve this objective, we divided the paper into two main parts. The first part deals with the analysis of the use of funds from various EU funds from Slovakia's accession to the EU to the present - pre-accession period, shortened programming period 2004-2006, programming periods 2007-2013 and 2014-2020. In the second part, we analyse the use of available funds in the given periods by Vÿchodoslovenskâ Water Company, Plc. to build the environmental infrastructure in the eastern Slovakia. In processing the article, we mainly used methods such as literature search, analysis, synthesis, comparison. We relied on available Slovak and foreign literature, including current legislation in the relevant analysed period. We performed an analysis of the possibility of financing projects from EU funds in the period before Slovakia's accession to the EU, in the programming periods 2004¬2006, 2007-2013 and 2014-2020, and then we processed the data into clear tables. Findings: The existing differences in the economic and social development of individual regions of Slovakia, which arose in the past and gradually intensified, need to be systematically addressed in order to reduce the regional disparities. Supporting and strengthening the development of less developed regions is one of the priorities of the government's regional policy of Slovakia. Originality/value: In 2017, there were 2,413 independent municipalities in the Slovak Republic, which were supplied with drinking water from public water mains. Their share of the total number of municipalities is 83.49%. Despite the fact that in the years 2012-2017 there were 66 more municipalities with public water supply in Slovakia, there are still 477 municipalities, tj. 16.51% of the total number of municipalities, without public water supply.