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• A gazdasági növekedés gyorsításának esélyei Magyarországon 2030-ig

  5-26

  Peter Mihalyi

  Views:

  121

  The regime change in 1989/1990 has not produced the expected result: Hungary has not been able to catch-up with the Western market economies. Can Hungary grow 2-3 times faster then its competitors during the next 20 years, as the present Hungarian government declared in its economic plans? Can Hungary improve its relative position and catch-up with the per capita GDP level of the EU-27 average by 2030? The conclusion of the paper is that this is very unlikely to happen. But there is ample room for accelerating productivity growth, and in this regard, every percentage difference counts enormously in the long-term. Three factors of production are analyzed: the natural-physical-geographical endowments of Hungary (N), Labour (L) and the capital stock (C). The following new findings are discussed. First, contrary to the widely held view, the amount of labour currently used by the Hungarian economy is not low in international comparison. The education of the workforce is also adequate. The problem is its allocation: too many workers are employed in low productivity, small firms. The only way forward is to promote the concentration of enterprises, to support the increase in the number of medium-sized and large firms. Second, the rate of domestic savings needs to be increased considerably, to allow for a low-cost financing of investments. In turn, this requires a substantial reform in three areas: healthcare, pensions and higher education. As long as the welfare state exists in its present form and these three spending items are largely financed by the state, one cannot reasonably expect households to save and accumulate families" long-term reserves in financial assets. But before these changes happen the political alite must accept that the obstacles to productivity growth have to be removed from the legal and political stuctures.

  JEL classification: E66, O47, O50, O52

• Az európai növekedési potenciál eróziója

  5-23

  Peter Halmai

  Views:

  94

  The potential growth rate in the EU Member States has been declining and lagging behind their competitors since the 1990's. Due to severe productivity problems in the EU (first of all the significant decrease in the total factor productivity dynamics) and the insufficient adaptation to the processes of globalisation, further remarkable and permanent decline in the potential growth rate is expected. Paradoxically the potential growth rate might decrease in the long run to a greater extent in the new Member States. As a result of the present global economic crisis new risks might appear. The riskss of the recurrence of shocks are significant. These factors project further erosion of the European growth potential. Integrated structural reforms and a comprehensive review of the European model are needed in order to overcome the unfavourable trends and put Europe on a more favourable growth path than the one indicated in this study.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: F15, F43

• Communitarisation in the cultural spheres of the member states of the European Union

  127-144

  Akos Toth

  Views:

  92

  The intstitutions of the European Union encourage the liberalisation of the cultural sector wirh the reduction of the coercive power of the member states. The article assumes that communitarisation in the cultural sphere exists although there is no EU Treaty (acquis) on cultural policy and the member states use different cultural financing models. The author first analyses the government and household expenditure for culture of the OECD countries, then compares the productivity and profitability indicators of the post socialist countries with the same indicators' EU 25 average.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes: Z10, Z11

• Market institutions precede market beliefs: a test with cross-country regressions

  3-30

  Pál Czeglédi

  Views:

  247

  The paper examines the literature on culture, economic growth and institutions to derive hypotheses about the relationships between market beliefs, institutions, and productivity. It then tests these hypotheses with cross-country regressions. First, it points out that each of the four cause-and-effect hypotheses of the possible relationships have an economic literature, in that market beliefs are seen as parts of culture. Second, the paper tests these hypotheses by making use of the fact that they consider different variables as exogenous ones. Measures of market beliefs are the coefficients of the country-dummies in the regressions run with individual data from the World Values Survey. The tests support the two hypotheses which hold that it is institutions, not market beliefs, that are exogenous.

  Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes: L26, O43, P16