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The economic and social role of private farms in Hungarian agriculture
33-41Views:159The situation and importance of private farms in Hungary have significantly changed and are still changing due to the political and economic regime change of 1989-90 and subsequent events. The aim of this study is to provide – unlike the practice of the last two decades – an impartial review of the social and economic role of Hungarian private farms. To demonstrate the changes occurring in private farms, we rely on the data of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO-KSH)such as the General Structure Surveys, the Farm Structure Surveys, and tables from the online stADAT database.
From the point of view of methodology, time series analyses (2000–2010) were performed in the framework of this secondary research. Our hypothesis that private farms in Hungary deserve much more attention than previously, from the perspective of the output of Hungarian agriculture, food consumption and, last but not least, employment (the environmental factor was not examined this time) has been clearly confirmed. The role and significance of this group have also been exceedingly important since EU accession, particularly in the fields of horticulture and animal husbandry, and the strengthening of these positions is indisputably a national economic interest. -
Exploitation of relations among the players of the mutton product cycle
129-134Views:112The continuous weakening of Hungarian sheep sector and its low effectiveness in terms of value added have posed crucial problems in recent years.The focal problem has been partially caused by economic and market problems.Among these issues, mostly the poor mutton supply chain gives rise to difficulties; therefore the present study seeks to reveal the factors/input variables which predominantly influence the generation of value added. We have constructed a model for the mutton product cycle to represent the relations of phases but mutton trade is not included.The most significant aim of our investigation was to identify the volume of value added generated during processing in various phases of the product cycle and the change of which inputs affected this volume. The received findings suggested that in case of capital uniformity the output of processing was mostly influenced by sheep progeny on the bottom level of the mutton product cycle.
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Tourism Development Challenges of an Island Destination in a Aging Society, Case Study of Ojika Island of Japan
31-38Views:293Japan’s inbound tourism numbers have been steadily rising in the past decade due to active promotion, easing of visa regulations, rapidly developing Asian economies and the depreciation of the Japanese Yen. The government’s goal is welcoming 40 million foreigners yearly by 2020, and leading them to rural destinations. There is a concern whether rural destinations in Japan are prepared for this sudden surge of tourists. The plans to bring masses to rural destinations implies a steady supply of tourism service, but the ageing and shrinking population of Japan together with the migration towards cities, leave some destinations without a key resource: workforce. This paper tries to understand the current situation of such rural, isolated communities, and whether they have the capacity to develop and expand the tourism industry. The case study was carried out on Ojika, an island destination in Nagasaki Prefecture. Several visits to the destination, participant observation and structured as well as unstructured interviews with stakeholders provide the primary data for the research. Through interviews with town officials, businesses and residents, different approaches to the demographic problems are introduced. The results show that the tourism development strategies cannot concentrate only on the strictly tourism industry elements of the destination but have to look at the community and infrastructure too, in this case, the labor market. The demographic change in society can put a limitation on development, thus counter measurements have to be considered and included in the tourism strategy. Further research is needed on less remote destinations, where there is a land-connection with another settlement, and whether a “commute based workforce” can ease the problem or by raising the costs of labour, a different, feasibility problem arises in the accommodations.
JEL Classification: Z32
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„Green” Public Relations (Public relations in the sector of products and services for Polish agriculture)
67-74Views:115The field of Public Relations has undoubtedly been assuming growing importance in Poland. Understood as an element of marketing communication or a function of company management, it has a significant impact on company’s external and internal environment. According to Puls Biznesu3 the value of the Polish PR market amounted to 250m PLN in 2005, which is a 20% increase as compared to 2004. According to the author Urszula S ´wiatl⁄owska, “the turnover of PR agencies is growing and even smaller companies demonstrate their interest in the services”. Considering this, it can be assumed that PR activities will soon be initiated by many smaller Polish companies, often connected with the agricultural sector. The change discussed by the authors of the article reflects the phenomenon of PR’s growing importance among other communication channels in Poland.
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Tourism, meditation, sustainability
81-91Views:236The economic value of meditation based services is clearly demonstrated by a growing number of companies using such services. In the USA one quarter of the companies offer in-house meditation training to their employees. On the otherhand,the number of those who think that the western consumption paradigm in its present form is unsustainable is also increasing. In addition to its business value, meditation and its most popular western form mindfulness is a practical tool that can catalyze a change in our world view and value system. A basic precondition for learning meditation techniques is to have an open, receptive, feminine attitude. As it is revealed in the present research, tourists poses a significantly elevated level of openness to new experience. This increased openness together with an upward trend for spiritual experiences can create a synergy for certain destinations, accommodation types, tourism locations to expand their service portfolio with meditation based services. While favourable physical and psychological effects of traditional tourism services fade within a few weeks, meditation is a portable tourism product which can be taken home and practiced regularly in a virtually cost-free way. By learning and practicing meditation the extremely poor physical and psychological condition of the Hungarian population could be improved in a preventive and cost-effective way. As the level of mindfulness is positively correlated with sustainable behaviour by offering meditation services tourism might take on a new level of significance in the battle for sustainability.
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Development of the European Union’s environmental policy and its measures for climate protection – a review
Views:310The negative impacts of human activities on the environment and nature can be felt worldwide. Thus there is a growing focus on measurements that keep sustainability in mind. As one of the main pioneers of environmental protection and sustainability efforts, these aspects are more and more prevalent in the current environmental policy of the European Union (EU). In this review article, the development of the environmental policy of the EU is presented. After listing the main milestones, the role of the EU in the area of environmental protection, the frameworks built around the goals and the roles of the institutions are discussed. Then – with an international detour – the details of the Paris Agreement about climate change and the state of the 20/20/20 commitments are summarised. In the remaining parts of the article, the focus is on the climate protection goals of the EU for the next three decades, the expected future directions, and the agenda of the von der Leyen Commission concerning climate protection. An important step and tool for achieving the goals set until 2050 is to incorporate climate and environmental protection elements to the 2021-2027 budget of the EU. In order to achieve the expected effects, it is crucial to develop the right tools of the environmental policy, to form a widespread cooperation, to raise awareness, and incentivise and support the innovative solutions in the sustainability area.
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Analysis of the producer price of Hungarian raw milk in international comparison
27-32Views:158Although the dairy market crisis eased in 2011, Hungarian dairy farmers still find it difficult to produce milk profitably. As a result of the crisis, many dairy farmers abandoned milk production or reduced the size of their dairy herds in 2009 and 2010. Today, many of farmers are also considering ceasing production, in spite of the fact that the global dairy industry is facing an upturn. A dairy farm can operate profitablyy in three ways: 1) if it can reach a relatively high level of producer price 2) if it can increase milk production per cow 3) if it can achieve a relatively low cost of production. In the present study, I primarily analyse the development of the Hungarian producer price of raw milk in international comparison. Next, I list those factors which directly or indirectly influence the producer price of raw milk. Finally, I examine the relationship among disposable income, milk consumption and milk price. Since the start of 2009, the dairy market has been confronted with a period of extraordinary law prices. After bottoming out, prices had begun to slowly stabilise during the second half of 2009. By the end of that summer, international prices had started to strengthen and the last quarter of 2009 was characterized by a steady rise in prices. The strong recovery in prices experienced after 2009 was triggered by increased demand, mainly from oil exporting countries, but also from China.
The price increase, however, reflected a significant increase in input costs in Hungary; the high level of feed prices and the unfavourable change in the macroeconomic environment must be stressed. The rising excise duty on diesel fuel and the VAT increase had a direct impact on Hungarian dairy farmers. These negative factors have increased the costs of the sector, narrowing the ability of those active in it to operate efficiently. -
The role of education, knowledge and human resources for the agricultural development in the perspective of new cap: an hypothesis of change in Basilicata
123-129Views:128The role of education, knowledge and human resources in the agribusiness becomes of primary importance for the development of agricultural sector and, more generally, of the territory. The main objective of the present paper is to verify the role of investment in human resources and, consequently, in services for the agricultural development for the dynamics of rural development, trade and international cooperation of agribusiness.After a literature review, the paper firstly analyses the characteristics of the Italian Region of Basilicata, selected for our empirical application, and secondly develops an econometric model to explain the relationship between the rural GDP and a set of economic variables and of network-education-social (NES) dummy variable. These NES is representative of social, educational and, network factors, describing the degree of openness of the region firm. As expected, the results show that farmers may act as engines for economic development when they are trained on the basis of the needs and requirements related to innovation and research, and they are assisted through new models of organization of agricultural services.
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Police organization in the Republic of Croatia – problems in decision making
99-102Views:114During the last few years of my police work I had a chance to speak and share opinion with my work associates about the police system in Croatia. My colleagues sometimes shared my opinion and sometimes they did not about the quality of police organization. Everyone’s conclusion was that some sort of change in the police organization has to be made; organization of the police must follow and embrace modern standards in organization and conduct. Almost each person had the same opinion about police management and decision making. Their opinion was that management is not efficient; decision making is based on chain of command and not on finding good solutions; members of the management team do not have education or creativity to be qualified managers; form is more important than the quality of work.
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Examination of enterpreneurship ecosystem in Debrecen from the direction of open innovation spaces
51-59Views:129Innovation 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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Carbon dioxide emission trends and environmental problems in Central Europe
Views:214In this research, the effect of CO2 emission was measured in two different land-use types (Crop and Grassland) in Central European and V4 countries. The primary aim of this study is to identify the significant output of CO2 emissions from cropland and grassland. Secondary data collected from FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) between 2010 and 2017. Mann-Whitney U test and odds ratio used to study the differences between the two country groups, and Principal Component Analysis was applied to create a performance map regarding the emission. A General Additive Panel model has analyzed the influence of area sizes and the regional differences on emissions. Results showed that the effect of grassland size is the primary factor in CO2 emission. A significant difference can only be found between CEU and V4 countries regarding grassland size effect on CO2 emission under grassland, which was rather small in the case of the V4 group but explained a larger part of the variance the of CEU countries. The odds of having higher CO2 from cropland to grassland was 2.43 times in the case of V4 compared to CEU countries.
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Analysis of the influential factors on gross value added in the Hungarian sheep sector
107-112Views:119The competitiveness of the Hungarian sheep sector has been in steady decline for some time now. Crucial has been the problem that the value added in the sector is not generated in Hungary, as most of the produced lambs in Hungary leave the country with an average weight of 21 kilograms, with slaughtering happening abroad.A model has been constructed for our investigations, which introduces the connections between the product cycle phases for mutton in Hungary. This model allows us to calculate the volume of gross value added generated within specific product cycle phases. We used Monte Carlo simulation for our examination, for which the Crystall ball software package was utilized, namely the OptQuest module, for optimization. First, we conducted an optimization of an experiment number of 500,000 for “Gross value added” in the case of the slaughterhouse. During the optimization, Easter, Christmas and August lamb ratio and ewe number, as well as progeny, were set as decision variables and examined as values of gross value added, the decision variables of which contribute to obtaining the best results. The gained decision variables were set in the model and a Monte Carlo simulation was run with an experiment number of 500,000, where only the values of the conditions were changed along the pre-set dispersion; the values of the decision variables were fixed. The most significant aim of our investigation was to identify the volume of gross value added generated during processing in various phases of the product chain and the change of which inputs affected this volume the most. The findings proved that, in the case of capital uniformity, the output of processing was most influenced by sheep progeny on the bottom level of the mutton product chain. This factor is followed by that of weight gain in the source material producing and fattening sub-modules, as well as the gross wage in starter lamb feed and meadow hay in the source material producing sub-modules. Contour plots helped to describe the connections between these factors. By using contour plots, the volume of gross value added might be forecast for various combinations of factors.
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Analysis of economic issues relating to the dairy sector, with emphasis on price transmission
61-70Views:146The dramatic decline in consumption after 1990 was an important problem during the analysis of the sector. Even today, consumption is still below the degree that was before the political change, and significantly lags behind the EU level.The importance of this topic is emphasized by the fact that surplus milk could be marketed through the increased domestic consumption; this would create a more stable and calculable situation for farmers. Therefore, I considered it important to reveal what factors and by what shares influence the consumption of milk and dairy products. The relationship, time series and cross-sectional analysis based on national and international databases demonstrate the relationship between the consumption of milk and dairy products and the other determining factors of consumption in Hungary and in the EU-25 through diagrams. I draw the conclusion that there is a medium correlation between the development of the economy, the higher income level and the consumption of milk and dairy products. Just before our EU accession, the dairy sector was one of the most critical industries of Hungarian agriculture, which is why I chose this for my analysis. I regard as a new scientific result the econometric analysis of the asymmetric market conditions in the price transmission approach within our dairy sector between 1995 and 2003. I confirmed and quantified that the market is under an oligopoly and defined the direction of price adjustment. Furthermore, I regard as a new result in the price transmission analysis (also published in the article published with Dr. József Tóth), that the three possible dimensions (elasticity, a symmetry relations,lag) are analysed simultaneously.Therefore,a more sophisticated picture is given on price transmission. The theoretical advantages and disadvantages are verified by an example of a vertical coordination based on the horizontal cooperation in the dairy sector (Alföldi Tej Ltd).
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Analysis of the leisure sport activities in University of Debrecen
75-80Views:124The sports program of the professional higher education focusing on the leisure sports opportunities. New needs, change in taste and new leisure habits of the young generation should be taken into account to design the University’s leisure sports program. In my study I was dealing with a questionnaire survey investigating the attitude of the students of the University of Debrecen to leisure sports, and the students’ opinions about their own physical status. Data collection was completed on a paper based questionnaire, 42 closed-type questions were included and a total of 213 students completed it. In conclusion I found that the students are satisfied with their physical states although not many of them do sport on a regular basis. I revealed the primary excuses for neglecting sports: lack of time, laziness and timetable discrepancies. These findings make it imperative that by avoiding the existing discrepancies the students be provided the widest range of time in their time tables available for physical activities.
JEL code: Z20
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