The Roma or "Gypsies" are Europe's largest and poorest ethnic minority. Nearly 80 per cent of them live in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The Roma - Non-Roma educational gap, always substantial but slowly closing in the communist years, widened again after the...

This paper discusses design errors in public pension systems, using Hungary as an illus-tration. When the communist political and economic system was replaced by democracy and market economy, the subsequent governments had even greater difficulties in de-signing consistent pension reforms than...

While the increased frequency of relocation of productive capacities to lower wage countries from developed economies has given rise to discussions concerning job losses and de-industrialisation, developments in the host countries of relocation have been widely neglected. Hungary, together with...

Using unique data from Hungary, we assess the gap in standardized test scores between Roma and non-Roma students and show that this gap is comparable to the size of the Black-White test score gap in the United States in the 1980s. The ethnic test score gap in Hungary is nearly entirely explained...

The EU LEADER initiative has been running for 20 years and plays an important role in the development of European rural areas, however, in countries joining to the EU after 2004 it is still a relatively new phenomenon. In Hungary, for example, the LEADER+ programme was launched in 2005 with an...

The goal of this study is to present an insider view on the pension reforms implemented in Hungary between 1996 and 2009. Both political economy as well as institutional economics will be used as the main approaches to analyse and explain the reform process and some of its effects. The following...

Under perfect competition and constant returns to scale, firms producing homogeneous products set their prices at their marginal costs which also equal their average costs. However, the departure from these standard assumptions has important implications with respects to the derived theoretical...

The partial privatization of the US Social Security system was clearly the top economic policy priority for the new Bush administration. While many famous economists, publicists and politicians support, others reject the partial privatization of the Social Security system. The international...

In some cases spot markets failure to govern to whole or a part of the marketing channel effectively and contractual relations are gaining more importance. It is especially true in case of agricultural markets, since these markets became more differentiated and market players are vulnerable in...

Through the introduction of a comparative party-state model, I will first demonstrate that due to specific structural and dynamic constraints, the capacity of party-states to learn is both limited and uneven. Differences in the room for manoeuvre are defined by structural and dynamic specifics...