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Reasons for and obstacles to cycling in opinions of residents of Debrecen, Hungary
53-59Views:381It is a basic aim of the European Union that due to the developments in 2014-2020 the bicycle would become one of the most often used transportation, touristic, and sports equipment. We were interested to see to what extent is bicycling present in the transportation system of Debrecen and what are the most important reasons for its residents to use the bicycles. The dedication of Debrecen to promote cycling is clearly proven by the number of newly built or resurfaced bike paths and by the fact that the University of Debrecen has introduced – alone in the region – UniBike which is a bicycle renting system brought forth by the need of its students. Here we present the developments that took place in the North Plain Region in the past few years. We have also analyzed the national and European strategies and reports on bicycling. A survey was conducted among the youth of Debrecen to explore their cycling habits. The data were evaluated using the EvaSys program. Until the end of 2011 with the help of different funds 862 km of bike paths had been built in Hungary. In the North Plain Region due to funds totaling 777 million HUF 15.7 km long bike paths had been constructed until 2015. The development of tourism in this direction is promoted by the web-pages and brochures offering bicycle-tours around Debrecen. Nevertheless, bicycling in the neighboring townships is present not as an instrument for sports and/or tourism, rather as a mean of transportation. It is a clear goal in Europe and thus in Hungary to have bike paths that can provide the means of safe cycling. In parallel, it is also important to promote the benefits of bicycling, including positive physiological effects, cost-effectiveness, and environment-friendliness to increase the proportion of those who select bicycling as an alternative.
JEL Code: I15
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On tests for long memory process behavior of international tourism market: Thailand and India
95-99Views:421In our research we examine the behaviour of both Thailand’s and India’s international tourism market by using long-memory analysis. The international tourism market of Thailand combined with seven groups such as East Asia, Europe, The Americas, South Asia, Oceania, Middle East and Africa. Similarly, the international tourism market of India combined with nine countries: USA, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Malaysia, Australia and Sri Lanka. Moreover, three statistical tests for long-memory process such as R/S test, Modified R/S test and GPH-test are employed to study these markets. The empirical findings in general provide more support for long memory process in international tourism market of Thailand and evidence for short-term dependence in international tourism market of India. Therefore, the policy makers of each country should understand the behaviour of long memory process in international tourism market before launching any stimulating campaign to this industry.
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TRENDS IN HONEY CONSUMPTION AND PURCHASING HABITS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
Views:952Honey is a staple food of animal origin, with many beneficial properties, so the study of consumption and purchasing habits is an important issue. The main aim of our research is to present the market situation and conditions of the domestic beekeeping sector from the consumer's point of view. We considered it appropriate to present the beekeeping market because the European Union is the second largest honey producer in the world and Hungary is the largest honey producer in the EU. Thus, global and EU trade changes, market trends and changes in consumer habits are significant factors influencing the domestic situation. The market situation is presented through a review of the relevant domestic and foreign literature, and statistical databases (EU Member States' honey programmes, KSH, OMME, Statista databases and reports) are analysed. The research aims to find out the direction of honey consumption and purchasing patterns and trends in European honey consumption. We chose an online questionnaire survey method to assess consumption and purchasing habits in Hungary and present the results in comparison with similar Hungarian studies. To analyse the situation in Europe, we have collected and analysed relevant research reports, primary and secondary studies from several EU countries. Finally, the data from each country are compared, highlighting similarities and differences.
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Dairy farms efficiency analysis before the quota system abolishment
147-157Views:515The abolishment of the dairy quota system in the EU is expected to increase competition across dairy farms in Europe. Assuming a common price for milk in the EU, only the most efficient farms will survive in the new environment. The main objective of the research is to compare dairy farms in Germany, The Netherlands and Hungary about their technical efficiency. In the first part of the research, the efficiency is measured by partial efficiency indexes using one dimensional efficiency measuring. In the second part, the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) have to be used to measure efficiency in a multidimensional space, using six inputs and two outputs. It appears from the results that the highest efficiency farms are in the Netherlands, and then Germany and Hungary follow thus, we get that the most efficient farms are in the Netherlands with 84% efficient. The German farms are 76% efficient. The Hungarian farms are 68% efficient. With respect the abolishment of the dairy quota system, our results suggest that the Dutch farms are the most efficient, thus probably they will increase their production after the quota system. But because the size of the country we cannot expect dramatic changes in the European Dairy market. The Germans farms efficiency is lower, but their efficiency is also lower, so we won’t expect high increase about the dairy supply. The Hungarian dairy sector is not so efficient like the Dutch, and the size of the sector has also small among the European countries, thus if they want to survive the quota system demolishing, they have to increase their technical efficiency.
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Multifunctional agriculture: An engine of regional economic growth?
7-15Views:321The historical role of agriculture in economic geography and recent conceptual developments – including multifunctional agriculture (MFA), the new economic geography, amenity-driven growth, and the “world is flat” and “creative class” hypotheses – are examined, and recent empirical research in NorthAmerica and Europe is reviewed, in order to assess the potential for MFA as an engine of regional economic growth. Ideal MFA policy corrects market failures and is mostly amenity-augmenting. It has the capacity to enhance opportunities for farmers on urban fringe; stimulate growth in high-amenity rural regions accessible to cities that offer opportunities for high-value work; and generate growth in relatively remote high-amenity regions. The scope for market-failure-correcting MFA policy to propel economic growth in lessfavored regions is limited – remoteness is non-responsive to policy in the short to medium term, and amenities that attract in-migration (e.g. proximity to sea, lakes, mountains, pleasant climate) are givens for favored locations but can at best be complemented by pro-active policy – but not trivial. While this paper focuses on regional economic growth, it well to rememberthat growth is not everything. Regions unlikely to experience growth need to create satisfying futures. Market-failure-correcting MFA policy has the potential to improve quality of life, well-being, and perhaps incomes in many if not all rural places regardless of location. This accomplishment would not be trivial – economic growth for all regions regardless of resources, amenities, and remoteness is not a serious prospect, and regions in decline face daunting problems maintaining essential services and quality of life.
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Analysis of demand for wellness and medical tourism in Hungary
57-62Views:520Health tourism in Hungary holds major opportunities. When analysing medical and wellness accommodation data, it can be stated that the Hungarian population is keenly interested in health-related tourism services. From the aspect of further development, health tourism based on medical services can be a take-off point for Hungarian tourism. In my opinion, the next few years will be crucial for Hungary’s ranking among health tourism destinations. The country’s initial circumstances are rather favourable, whereas the revaluation of the quality aspects of these services and the fact that the surrounding countries have also recognised the opportunities in health tourism led to an intensified competitive environment. Consequently, if Hungary does not take advantage of its current opportunities, there will be even less chance to develop the country into the primary thermal and medicinal waterbased health tourism destination of Europe in ten years. Yet, this is one of the foci of the objectives set out in the New Széchenyi Plan.
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MBA education at Debrecen University Faculty of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development
79-86Views:545Debrecen is the capital of the Great Hungarian Plain, the centre of many institutions, organizations and business companies just in the heart of Europe. It has provided an ideal setting for higher education since 1538. With this past of more than 450 years, the University of Debrecen is the oldest higher educational institution in continuous operation in Hungary based in the same city. Higher education in agriculture began in 1868, when the National Higher School of Agriculture was formed in Debrecen. The University of Debrecen has more than 26 000 students, and more than 1700 instructors teach at the University, which has 13 faculties, 2 independent institutions, 20 doctoral schools and offers the widest choice of higher education. This outstanding intellectual centre, with a vast research and development capacity, has a growing importance in the economic and social development, cultural progress of the region. It devotes special attention to serving the needs of a knowledge based society more efficiently, and it strives to become the knowledge centre of the region, which also preserves traditions and values.
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The understanding of international tourism development
53-54Views:306Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. Tourism has become one of the major players in international commerce, and represents at the same time one of the main income sources for many developing countries. This growth goes hand in hand with an increasing diversification and competition among destinations (Unwto, 2010).Working and serving in this pumping industry means to understand and react to the needs of all these people moving around this “small” planet! Success is defined by those who understand these needs and fulfill them to the satisfaction. Unfortunately, our industry is rather slow and we can be characterized as reactive instead of innovative.We adapt too slow compared to other industries that define the needs of their costumers before the costumers actually calls for it!
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Examination of enterpreneurship ecosystem in Debrecen from the direction of open innovation spaces
51-59Views:343Innovation is not just a technology, but it is rather a comprehensive vision of what the future should look like and which requires changes in many ambits. Innovation is driven by people’s needs, ambitions and dreams, and it is necessary that people at different positions in the society change the way they work and live. Innovation, as a result of human interactions, often fails because people do not understand each other, as they belong to different worlds which have their own languages and cultures. While innovation system-like thinking recognizes that the needs are a good mix of factors for innovation, it is hard to establish the perfect mix beforehand: innovation systems and policies need to be adaptive” (Klerkx, Mierlo & Leeuwis 2012). I tried to bring this complex vision to our future. The actuality of the topic is provided by the fact that we are in the period of the development of digital industrial revolution, on the peak of the technology innovations, slowly resulting in the revolutions of the machines. These technological innovations, trends, equipment or new technological achievements often make our work easier, or they may replace us, and will bring changes transforming the world with them. At present era, the availability and use of the relevant knowledge is essential. In Western Europe and in other more developed countries different spaces provide places for evolving various trends, applying the acquired knowledge, e.g. development of Silicon Valley, polices, clusters, co-workings. These innovative spaces may form a bridge for evolving a global, international or regional technology and knowledge transfer, sharing our knowledge and developing our competitiveness. They may be the engine of a “new world”. The entrepreneurship ecosystem in Debrecen was investigated regarding the presence of open innovation spaces. Though Debrecen has already had open innovation spaces, it does not have space operating as HUB. „HUB is a global platform, where people from all corners of the planet connect and engage in collaborative action to realize enterprising ideas for a better world” (HUB GMBH 2012). Furthermore, I studied the fact that why the creation of HUB in Debrecen is reasonable concerning every sector, and what characteristics this space may have. In order to analyze my hypotheses, I used questionnaires made by Delphi survey. During the process experts of this field were asked in two turns. Selecting the experts occurred on the basis of Helix model.
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Liquid bio-fuels in Hungary: effects and contradictions
89-94Views:354The increase of living standard requires ever more energy, despite energy saving measures. Domestic growth was 100 PJ between 2000 and 2006, and 77% of the total utilization was importe (Hungarian Central Statistical Office, 2008).Sustainability was endangered not only in our energy and commerce policy. Our domestic natural conditions are suitable for plant production; however, the stagnation of the domestic population and decreasing livestock numbers restrict in land marketing. Therefore, significant surpluses from year to year had to be stored and sold abroad, and the fact that the interventional purchase of corn and the expected stringent new EU regulation of the sugar beet sector, make the strategic significance of these branches uncertain. The difficult marketing opportunities make the better utilization of our opportunities in producing liquid bio-fuels possible from marketing aspects, while environmental issues and realizing the EU directions enforce to do so in a longer term. Over the short term, agricultural and competitive aspects will determine its spread, which cause different effects in Europe in comparison with the developing countries. According to Nábrádi-Ficzeréné Nagymihály, 2008, one of the breaking points of Hungarian agriculture lies in the utilization of alternative energy sources. During the past period, many contradictory opinions came forward relating to economies, agricultural effects, food risks as well as the energetic and environmental efficiency of bio-fuels. One thing is certain: these fuels are already used today and their significance has been increasing. Although due to technological development, spread of new products and processes (cellulose-based bioethanol, bioethanol, biogas, hydrogen, biomethane) will obviously have to be expected in the future, at present biodiesel and bioethanol are determent among bio-fuels, thus I deal with these as well as their energetic and agricultural effects in my study.
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The Opinion of Visitors on the Touristic Attractions and Services of the Esterhazy Castle of Fertőd
97-102Views:373The lately renovated Esterhazy Palace is one of Europe’s biggest Baroque palaces. This paper examines the visitors’ opinion of this worldwide famous palace. This survey-based study was carried out in 2016/2017. The sample was of 800 people, using paper-based questionnaire. It emerged from the study that the visitors needed to be separated analyzed differently under and above 18 years of age, because the push and pull factors vary significantly. Other words, the adult visitors (persons, families) decided themselves to go and see or not, but the young people were influenced by their teachers. Other important lessons of the study was that the visiting process does not end with the viewing of rooms and tools, but the different souvenirs and providing further information, and services are also part of it. This is evidenced by the fact that the worst rating was given by the related service. Organizing and ensuring this is an important task of the management of the palace.
JEL Classification: M3. O18, Z32
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Globalisation of commercial theme parks case: The Walt Disney Company
21-28Views:1626In this contribution we focus on the globalisation of commercial theme parks with Walt Disney Company as the best known case study. After definitions and historical background of theme parks, we analyse the visitors key factors. For the Walt Disney Cie we start with some historical facts, we set up a SWOT-analysis and focus then on Euro Disneyland Paris, the biggest theme park of Europe.
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The situation of agricultural sector in Hungary – trends and territorial aspects
Views:549Based on its geographical features, Hungary is basically an agricultural country. The proportion of the production area within the total area of the country is approximately 80% and the proportion of arable land is 60%. This makes our country one of the first in the European Union. In the EU, only Denmark and the United Kingdom have a higher proportion of agricultural land. Hungary accounts for only 3% of the total agricultural area of the EU-27 Member States, however, it plays a significant role in the production of certain products. (Harangi-Rákos, 2013)
In addition, the climate is favorable for agricultural production, which also strengthens the country's agricultural character. Throughout history, we have rightly been given the honorable name “pantry” (Marosi, 2009), which was true both within the Monarchy and Europe. In the socialist system the agricultural country became a so-called “industrial-agrarian” country due to the violent industrializations.
Beyond industrial development, the service sector plays an important role in the national economy due to its technology-intensive nature. In addition, agricultural production is still significant in Hungary (Lakner et al. 2020). The agricultural sector is significantly involved in the production of the gross domestic product (Fróna-Kőmíves 2019) and in the positive development of the export-import balance. During the 2008 world crisis, it was thanks to this sector, among other factors, that the recession that affected our country did not deepen. The domestic consumption is largely covered by domestically produced commodities (Csatáriné, 2019)
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The possibilities of energetic applicability and economic evaluation of grape in the Szentantalfa township
25-32Views:279Energy production has become one of the key problems in the recent years. Hungary is lacking fossil fuels, but could play a leading role of biomass utilization in Europe. In the concept of biomass not only main-, but by-products (e.g. grape) are be included. Since farmers face a variety of difficulties in disposing of garpe from plantation sites it would be beneficial to encourage grape use in energy production. In our opinion due to varying transportation costs it is crucial to investigate the amount of potentially usable grape both for the whole country and in local township levels. Our economic studies were done on the Szentantalfa Township’s Balatonfüred-Csopak Vine Region. According to our findings the total amount of grape generated in the township theoretically amounts to 5.28 TJ exploitable that would operate a 360 kW boiler for a whole heating period (6 months). In our opinion the appearance of local energy production based on grape could significantly raise the ability of the future potential income of townships.
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The climate change and agriculture – dimensions and correlations
33-38Views:316Global climate changes are taking place and its impacts on economy are already occurring in fields like tourism, agriculture, forestry, infrastructure, insurance industry or capital market. Specialists draw attention that climate change has negative effects and positive effects. For example, in some parts of Europe, especially in north, the agricultural may benefit from temperature rise increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The most important part of these changes is due to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activity. Between greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest contributor with a weight around of 80% of total GHG emissions. The agriculture is the most affected sector by the climate change, but agricultural activities have many negative implications on environment through emissions of methane and nitrous oxide that result from changes in land use. Besides the negative impact, the agriculture may play a positive role to environment protection through the production of bio fuels. Because of the huge implications of climate change on human activities, the public authorities have made important steps in order to control this phenomenon, to reduce and prevent the negative impact.
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Development of commodity exchange in Croatia
87-89Views:286Purpose of this thesis work is to show relevance and necessarity for existing of commodity exchange and it’s influence to the economy of Croatia. Because eastern part of Croatia, region called Slavonia is mostly agricultural oriented, it is of essential relevance to establish and make operate of first commodity exchange in Croatia. Widely in the past, while Croatia was part of Austrian – Hungarian kingdom, first commodity exchange in Europe that was established in 1853. in Budapest, practically was domestic commodity exchange for Croatian business subjects, and they were able to use benefits it brought. Me personally, and a lot of other business people and business society in Croatia belive that time to reasteblish commodity exchange has come. In this thesis, I will give a deeper look in to commodity exchange, describe acctual situation in Croatia, show posibillities that commodity exchange brings, how it works and what has to be done to implement commodity exchange and benefits it will bring to Croatian economy.
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Integration Efforts in Agriculture
91-96Views:343The economic and political transition brought many challenges for the Hungarian agricultural sector. The break-up of large agricultural holdings had serious negative impacts on food production and on the export of agricultural products. Capital intensive profit-seeking intermediaries dominate the trading of agricultural goods that has injurious effects in terms of downward pressure on production prices and an increase in consumer prices. Cooperatives have a key role in effectively tackling the common challenges that small-scale producers have to face. More vertical integration along the food chain could contribute to providing rural employment and to an increase in living standards in rural areas. This study reviews the development, the specific features and the driving forces of modern cooperatives in Central Europe in general, and in Hungary in particular. The focus is on the integrator role of cooperatives and their future role in our globalised world.
JEL Classification: Q10, Q13
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Labour market attributes of disabled people in Hungary
119-122Views:479Nowadays employment is an evergreen topic in Europe. The North Great Plain Region of Hungary is a typical rural area in Hungary, the unemployment rate is higher in this region as the national average, that’s why it is important, to give the possibility of job for the people living in rural areas. This paper focuses on the relationship between the disabled and the labour market in the North Great Plain Region of Hungary. On the basis of the 8/1983 Hungarian Law many kinds of supplies are provided by the State for people living with disabilities. It is very difficult to provide jobs for these people after their rehabilitation. Statistical figures show that the highest ratio of ‘people living with disabilities’ can be found in the North Great Plain Region of Hungary (30 per cent of the total number of ‘people living with disabilities’). The research focuses on special rehabilitation firms (they are specialised to employ disabled employers) and their employees. Two questionnaires for the above mentioned firms and their employees were created in order to gather information on their activities as well as relationship between the firms and its employees. Altogether 400 employees filled in the questionnaires. The current study shows the results of this survey. It can be stated that this paper shows the relationship between the employment and the types of enterprises, and disabled workers’ qualification level, the need for further education. According to the latest trends we analyse the attitude to the rehabilitation of people living with disabilities and how they will be able to work again not only in ‘rehabilitation firms’. After summarizing all claims of participants we can make an impression in this area and demonstrate the problems for the labour market generally.
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