Honesty and Trust in the Light of the Post-Socialist Transition

In the first half of the 2002-2003 academic year, the members of a focus group at Collegium Budapest centred their research on examining the subject "Honesty and Trust in the Light of the Post-Socialist Transition". There were economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, legal scholars and philosophers in the group, some of them from the post-socialist region and others from elsewhere, conveying their experiences of honesty and trust in their respective countries. The research covered hundreds of phenomena and relations. The author of this paper confines himself to three problems: relations between firms; building a trustworthy state; the strategy for building trust.