This paper assesses the potential distortive impacts of state aids and of incumbent firms' market behaviours and business strategies on competitive outcome. The problems emerged within the framework of the third postal directive, the unresolved questions of regulation and the contradictions...

Savings behaviour seems to exhibit heterogeneity across nations, and within nations, too. Large changes in saving rates have been observed in the last decades that can be viewed as signs of the arbitrariness of saving. There is a long tradition in the savings literature that separates people...

We study the adjustment process of a small open economy to a sudden worsening of external conditions. To model the sudden stop, we use a highly non-linear specification that captures credit constraints in a convenient way. The advantage of our approach is that the effects of the shock become...

This paper explores and analyses the Hungarian institutional system for the creation and the transfer of knowledge in the field of agriculture and rural development. We consider the constitution and operation of the Agricultural Knowledge System (AKS) in Hungary, focussing on formal institutions...

This study is a natural continuation of the author’s earlier book on privatization in Hungary, covering the developments between 1989 and 2009 on 1700 pages. As it is well-known, the right wing FIDESZ government, which came to power with a 2/3 supermajority in Parliament, has embarked upon a...

The Hungarian oil company (MOL) and the national electricity holding (MVM) counted as the largest socialist enterprises already 30 years ago. Prior to 1990, they were roughly of the same size in respect of sales and employment, as well. Since the regime change, however, their development paths...

The paper recalculates total factor productivity (TFP) in Hungary, and based on this, presents an updated decomposition of GDP growth. Compared to the previous literature on Hungary, contributions include the quantification of human capital and the inclusion of the capacity utilization of...

Enhancing competitiveness is a popular target in economic policy making - not only at the national, but at the regional level as well despite neither generally accepted definition nor any strong agreement on how to measure it. In this chapter we discuss the conceptual underpinnings of why it is...

Agent based models are proposed as an adequate tool for analysing tax payer decisions and, thereby, the consequences of such decisions as they manifest themselves at the macro level. TAXSIM models the conduct of agents of three types, i.e. employers, employees and the government, in an economy...

We provide a new modus operandi for the computation of the nucleolus in cooperative games with transferable utility. Using the concept of dual game we extend the theory of characterization sets. Dually essential and dually saturated coalitions determine both the core and the nucleolus in...