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• Eastern-European education and economy

  73-82

  Janos Timar

  Views:

  117

  The main reason for the inability of the Eastern-European region to catch up economically is thought by many to be the fact that for a decisive period the state curtailed the incentive power of private property. The harmful effect of this was aggravated by the arms race. Contrary to this, this paper claims that the main reason is the underdevelopmnet of the population's knowledge base. The direct factor in this is the mistaken education policy, which because of the emphasis on quaility in schooling, imparted a low and weak knowledge base to the growing generation. The author claims that without a general and radical reform of education the eastern European region and Hungary as well, will lag behind in international competition.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL): I21, I28, O15

• Twenty-one Economic Arguments against an Unconditional Basic Income

  5-29

  Istvan Csillag

  Peter Mihalyi

  Views:

  383

  In 2013/14 there has been an intense public debate both in the European Union and in Hungary on the feasibility of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) support. In the Hungarian context, the publication of a 100-page proposal was an important milestone, in which a group of experts applied the UBI concept to the present circumstances. The study, the brainchild of István Bánfalvi, a distinguished social policy practitioner, proposed the following specific amounts as from January 2015: HUF 25,000 for children (≈ EUR 83), HUF 50,000 for adults and HUF 75,000 for expectant mothers. The present paper’s first objective was to challenge the entire 25-50-75 concept from both theoretical and practical-administrative perspectives. In addition, we tried to show that income poverty in Hungary is much less of a problem than generally presumed. Our final conclusion is that from a poverty alleviation point of view the geographical remobilization of the Hungarian Roma population is by far the most important issue. Roma living in small rural settlements should be assisted to move towards large cities, where the chances of finding work, education and health care are much better.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: H21, I38, J15