The Law on Fiscal Responsibility adopted late 2008 is a new element in Hungarian fiscal policy, although not without precedent. Under the law, the Parliament and the Government limit themselves to prevent high fiscal deficits and a further increase in public indebtedness, experienced in recent...

Over the past decade, increasing public debt has become one of the most important problems for the Hungarian economy, significantly constraining the room for manoeuvre for fiscal policy and in some periods even calling into question its sustainability. As a percentage of GDP, gross public debt...

If compliance with a fiscal rule in certain periods requires procyclical fiscal policy, it means that fiscal policy does not mitigate the cyclical fluctuations of the economy, but rather may amplify them, i.e. it is unable to perform its stabilisation function. On the basis of the analysis of...

In his speech held at the 46th Economic Conference organized by the Hungarian Economic Association Ferenc Karvalits, Deputy Governor of Magyar Nemzeti Bank discussed the challenges of monetary policy, global financial turbulence and the issue of global price increases. He emphasised that the MNB...

This study investigates changes in central bank balance sheets and the non-conventional central bank measures triggered by the crisis by comparing international examples. The trend of rapid expansion in central bank balance sheets and the resulting higher need for sterilisation is not solely a...

Cross-border bank lending to emerging markets dropped sharply in the second half of 2011 as the euro area crisis intensified. Stefan Avdjiev (BIS), Zsolt Kuti (Magyar Nemzeti Bank) and Elod Takáts (BIS) use the BIS international banking statistics to identify the key drivers of this decline....

The basic purpose of this study is to didactically demonstrate the factors shaping the currency swap stock of domestic banks prior to the crisis and to provide a descriptive analysis of how the structure and the functioning of the market changed during the crisis. The main conclusions of the...