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I consider the application of János Kornai’s soft budget constraint (SBC) concept to the state capitalist economy. I argue that interaction of SBC with agency problems within the government bureaucracy helps explaining a major feature of state capitalism – failure to privatize underperforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Bureaucrats supervising the failing SOEs prefer to keep them afloat and gamble for resurrection; in contrast, privatization would involve recognizing the loss, which would result in acknowledging the bureaucrat’s failure that is disincentivized by the state. This endogenously emerging preferential treatment of state-owned firms creates a competitive advantage against private firms; this explains why in state capitalism privatization may result in lower rather than higher productivity and therefore remain unpopular.

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Using a case study, this paper examines how EU standards of geographical indications (GIs) can integrate into Hungarian socio-embodied patterns. It uses apricots from the underdeveloped Gönc region of Hungary as an example, defined in the EU GI context as a local resource of cultural identity. The collective memory as a cultural heritage of the Gönc region is examined in relation to products and services that have existed for generations. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence that without geographical circulation, exchange, and appropriation of products, the associated knowledge of innovation strategies, innovation capabilities, and the market outcomes of firms in the food industry does not provide absorptive capacity. It suggests that innovative responses to existing isolated economic services could provide coherence among the three pillars of sustainability, given policy and institutional innovations designed to foster innovation and expand markets.

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This paper strives to investigate the level of business cycles synchronisation between 8 Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) and the EU-15. We use wavelet coherence and phase difference methodology as a very suitable tool that observes simultaneously the strength of business cycles’ co-movement in the aspect of time as well as in the aspect of frequency. The results indicate that the business cycles of CEECs are generally synchronised with the EU-15 business cycles, whereas distinct differences existed before, during, and after the financial crisis (2008–2009) and during the European sovereign debt crisis (2010–2011). In other words, we demonstrate that very strong business cycles synchronisation occurred in almost all CEECs during crisis periods and at higher wavelet scales, while only moderate synchronisation is recorded in relatively tranquil periods at higher frequencies. The results suggest that smaller CEECs, but also larger countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and to some extent Slovakia as well have a higher level of business cycles synchronisation with the EU-15, particularly in the crisis period at short-run as well as at long-run fluctuations. However, we do not find strong business cycles co-movement in cases of Poland and Latvia via HP and BP filters at higher frequencies during the crisis, which might indicate a higher resistance of these countries to external systemic shocks.

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The article examines how the roles of state institutions and state owned enterprises have been changed in Ireland since its independence, with special regard to the role of state ownership and crisis management. The history of planning and social partnership, the courses of nationalisation and privatisation and the problem of damaging the state are discussed as well. The author concludes that the crisis has not resulted in the strengthening of the developmental or welfare role of the state, the evolution of a “developmental welfare state” has become less likely in Ireland in the course of crisis management. Another lesson is that the state can manage certain bad assets of the private sector in a way that yields a profit to the public. There are other costs of the crisis management, however, which are to be paid by the people and result in a decrease of state ownership and a shrinking of the welfare systems.

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This paper presents the initial results of a significant research conducted under the IOC PhD Student Research Grant Programme with the support of the Hungarian Olympic Committee. A macroand meso-level analysis were conducted within the framework of this research; this paper presents the macro model, with the aim of capturing important features of the economic, political and institutional environments which affect the productivity of a nation’s sport performance and growth; with this the paper contributes to an understanding of the key elements of high-performance sport development. The macro model divides sport into two groups – individual and team sports – in order to determine if there are any differences at the macro level. The influence of the economic factors which were included in the models shows a decreasing effect on the market share of nations, which means that other factors must also play a significant role in a nation’s international sporting success. The responsibility of national sport governance will become even more important in elite sport success in the future, which shows that the efficient utilisation of recourses will also become a key factor, along with an appropriate structure, organisation and integrated coordination.

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Land tenure security and land transfer markets are once again a topmost priority in the policy development agenda because of their expected outcomes in terms of equity and efficiency in the rural sector of China. The policy of rural land rights confirmation has been implemented since 2010 to enhance land tenure security and the transferability of farmland. However, only a few studies have been conducted on the effect of rural land rights confirmation on farmland transfer. Therefore, we use household-level survey data from 48 villages across Tianjin City and Shandong Province to explore whether rural land rights confirmation promotes the transfer of farmlands. Our empirical results show that rural land rights confirmation has significant and positive effects on the likelihood and amount of transfer-out land at the 5% significance level, but the effect on transfer-in farmland is insignificant. The results of the study have several policy implications. For instance, the agricultural comparative advantage should be improved through various agricultural subsidy policies. Moreover, the intermediary service network for farmland transfer should be established, and strengthening the non-farm employment skills and improving the non-agricultural employment market are necessary for the rural labour force.

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Society and Economy
Authors:
Attila Tasnádi
and
Balázs Szent-Iványi
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This paper presents a case-study to demonstrate the calculation methods of growth contributions using structural decompositions of input-output tables and their Hungarian applications. Although the required data are available with a considerable time-lag, results show that taking backward linkages through demand for inputs and value chain multipliers into account can significantly alter the picture on the growth effects of industries and final demand categories by the conventional approach based on quarterly GDP calculations. This can be instructive for analysts and policy- and decision-makers not only in Hungary, but also in other countries. The study was performed by using public macroeconomic and sectoral data obtained from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office.

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Europe and its southern neighbors

Interdependence, security and economic development in contemporary EU-MENA relations

Society and Economy
Author:
Daniel Gugan

The paper analyzes European Union – Middle East and North Africa (EU-MENA) relations from the perspective of complex interdependencies. As a theoretical framework, it outlines the application of Barry Buzan’s Security Complex Theory on the Euro-Mediterranean (or EU-MENA) region-pair. This involves the provision of a general overview on the several sectors of interdependence between the two regions, namely the military, political, economic, societal and environmental sectors. The paper then turns towards the deeper elaboration of the economic sector and identifies it as the most potent sector for European activism, where the Union could work most effectively on building a long-term solution for the stabilization of the MENA. As conclusions, the paper argues for a deeper economic integration between the two regions, which would provide opportunities for the MENA’s population to be economically successful “at home”, therefore reducing not only the highly visible migration pressure on the EU, but also other security threats such as civil wars, organized crime and weapon proliferation.

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The sovereign debt crisis of 2010 in the euro area significantly decelerated the monetary integration of the EU. The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether five post-communist member states of the EU are mature enough to adopt the euro. We used nominal exchange rates in the error correction model with asymmetric power ARCH (ECM-APARCH). Our results highlight that EU membership positively increased the impact of the euro on the currency of each of these countries in the short-run. In contrast, the long-term effect of the euro on each currency is negative for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Croatia. Wholly different results were obtained for Poland and Romania. The APARCH model showed that the negative responses of the euro had a greater or neutral effect on the conditional variance of each currency instead of the positive responses. The debt crisis of the euro area had no impact on the dynamic linkages between the currencies. Our research concludes that Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are not ready to join the euro area in the near future. On the other hand, the currencies of Poland and Romania are already aligned with the fluctuations of the euro.

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This paper outlines major theoretical and methodological problems in Quality of Work Life (QWL) research within organisational studies and discusses possible solutions, based on extensive literature analysis. An electronic search in the Scopus database found 1,244 publications utilising the QWL concept. From this sample we selected 387 papers dealing directly with QWL and compiled a final set of publications for detailed review. The literature analysis revealed the absence of a clear and concrete understanding of QWL, various (and often incomplete) approaches to QWL content and indicators and interference between QWL and other concepts such as ‘job satisfaction’, which all resulted in a general confusion about the notion in academic discussions. As a possible solution, we suggested distinguishing clearly and including the following in the single integrative research instrument: 1) an aggregate subjective QWL measurement tool and 2) an aggregate objective QWL measurement tool. Finally, we present arguments for a new understanding of QWL, combining subjective and objective measures in the context of a general integration between ‘working conditions’ and ‘needs satisfaction’ approaches.

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In order to define and implement the most effective measures to overcome the difficulties of the post-crisis period, the policy-makers of ECB must identify not just main weaknesses of each banking system, but their strong points also. This requires the application of multi-criteria analysis, considering that policy-makers need to take into account a number of different aspects that, on the whole, indicate the quality of the banking system. Our aim is a comparative analysis of European banking systems right after the Brexit moment and within the framework of the tight new Basel III regulations. In this paper, we have ranked the banking systems of the 28 EU member states using multi-criteria analysis, specifically the PROMETHEE II method. The use of the PROMETHEE II method in combination with the entropy method offers a comprehensive insight into the banking system of each member state, given that the observed countries are ranked according to 9 conflicting criteria that are mostly used in banking system analysis. Our analysis shows that the banking systems in Central and Eastern Europe are the best performers, while the EMU’s developed banking systems such as the German, Italian, British, and French one are positioned among the last ranked. The Portuguese and Greek banking systems are, as expected, ranked in the last positions in our list. The obtained results also pointed out that the ECB should change its approach to the management and further development of a European Banking Union.

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While technological innovation is a core element of efforts to increase public welfare, innovators are rarely trained to take the societal dimensions of innovation into account in a systematic manner. Responsible innovation has emerged within policy discourses worldwide to address this challenge. Implementing responsible innovation in daily practices, however, requires addressing both the multidisciplinary and the culturally situated nature of innovation processes. Effectiveness of Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) has been tested, but primarily only in developed countries, raising questions about how well it works in innovation and cultural settings differing from Western cultures. Therefore, this study analyzes the possibities of institutionalizing responsible innovation in an Eastern European country, namely in Hungary. For this investigation, we conducted STIR-pilots in two Hungarian natural science research groups. The findings show that though the original STIR method can be adapted to support responsible innovation practices in Hungary, the differences in the innovation environment and culture (such as grant-driven innovation; lack of trust; less knowledge on responsible innovation; lack of law on the societical impacts of research and innovaton) require methodological modifications in order to improve STIR’s effectiveness.

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Equivalence scales are commonly employed in income analysis to compare the wealth of households of various compositions (e.g., 0-child, 1-child). The choice of weights for this type of analysis is not self-evident. In this paper, subjective equivalence scales for households in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are estimated. We use longitudinal EU-SILC data for 2005–2012 following the approach of Goedhart et al. (1977) as employed by Bishop et al. (2014). The use of longitudinal data shows that previous results on the subjective minimum income that were based on the OLS estimates for cross-section data overestimated the impact from current income and underestimated the role of economies of scale. Subjective equivalence scales imply a decreasing marginal cost of children in the three countries, which makes them distinct from the OECD scale. The marginal cost of a first child is similar to the values assumed in the OECD scale, but the cost of a second child is much lower.

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The Czech Republic benefits from its geographical location, relatively cheap and educated labour force, industrial tradition, high economic growth, and political stability. During the last two decades, Czech-Chinese relations have intensified mainly in terms of trade but also in investment and, in more recent years, also at the political level. In this paper, we assess existing trade and investment relations between the two countries, the Czech Republic’s potential for Chinese trade and investment presence in the EU in comparison to other V4 countries, and also explore the future opportunities and threats for more intensified relations. The trade analysis reveals that the fragmentation of world production has enabled more Chinese value added exports to reach the EU western markets through processing in the Czech Republic. Mutual cooperation can be beneficial for both sides as long as both countries avoid corruption, bridge cultural differences, deal with profit repatriation and prevent misconduct in property rights.

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This paper aims to provide an overview of the key themes in the development of carbon accounting and auditing over the past twenty years. The evolution of the field since the Kyoto Agreement of 1997 has been divided into four stages. The need to account for and disclosure of greenhouse gas-related emissions of industrial organizations has emerged parallel to growing concerns about climate change, and international and national policy developments in the field have followed. Carbon accounting is an emerging field of business economics and covers a wide range of activities, including the measurement, calculation, monitoring, reporting and auditing of greenhouse gas emissions at organizational, process, product or supply chain levels. Various initiatives (such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or the Carbon Disclosure Project) motivate and assist industrial organizations in accounting for and reporting their achievements in the field. Different methodologies of carbon accounting (bottom-up, top-down and hybrid) enable industrial organizations to quantify their emissions; however, some trade-offs emerge when choosing among these approaches. Carbon accounting should not be an isolated task for businesses. On the contrary, there is a strong need to integrate carbon accounting issues into different functional fields in order to achieve both corporate and climate policy goals.

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In this paper, the prospects of the political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) are examined on the basis of demand and supply factors which favor a party’s electoral breakthrough and longtime persistence. It will be argued that although the party is currently profiting mainly from growing disillusion with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, it should not be treated as a single-issue (anti-immigrant) phenomenon. Building on a comparison with its unsuccessful predecessor, The Republicans, we argue that the party is better equipped to deal with factors usually obstructing the success of populist right parties in Germany.

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The collapse of one-party dictatorship and centrally planned economy based on state ownership opened up the pathways for the formation of different postsocialist systems. Among other variants in a certain number of postsocialist states, democratic capitalism could emerge. Recently the system of postsocialist capitalism has been going through the process of regression leading to a distorted and defective democracy and capitalism in some postsocialist countries. This essay reviews the literature on the relationship of democracy and capitalism in order to contribute to the creation of a theoretical framework for the analysis of the regression of postsocialist democratic capitalism. In the paper the argument is made that for the explanation of the regression of democratic capitalism, the structural analysis of postsocialist democratization and marketization should be supplemented with a theory that reflects on the role of political actors, the role of political parties, party competition in this process.

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Comparative economics and European integration

Convergence and divergence in the European Union and the effects of anti-crisis policies

Society and Economy
Author:
Bruno Dallago

Transformation processes in Central and Eastern Europe and deep economic reforms in China and other emerging countries did not end the variety of economic systems. Various brands of comparative economics have shown this variety in both theory and different countries. An increasingly important form of this variety concerns the process of European integration. Systemic differences within the European Union are the source of difficulties and tensions, of a European conundrum that appears in different forms and ways and that make the sustainability and progress of integration difficult. This article looks at the logic of and proposals by the “New Comparative Economics” and the “Variety of Capitalisms” literature to find an explanation to the problems and difficulties that the European integration is meeting, going beyond the standard technical explanations based on European convergence criteria. It finds that both theories, although important and useful for contributing to solving the European conundrum, do not account sufficiently for the novelty and the complexity of European integration.

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This paper deals with the Altab Ali Park and its significance in regards to the Muslim community in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Using Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, I would like to demonstrate how the Bangladeshi Muslim minority and the rest of the community of Tower Hamlets construct their collective memory through the transformation of the park. The article argues that the Altab Ali Park is in Pierre Nora’s term a lieu de mémoire with multiple layers, which has been developed to enhance community cohesion in the Borough. The park itself contains further lieux de mémoire with clear messages against extremist secular and religious ideologies. This makes the park a symbol of multicultural coexistence in the district, which could help increase community cohesion through shaping the identity of the inhabitants of Tower Hamlets.

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This paper evaluates the efficiency of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) in the European Union (EU). The paper first reviews the main trends governing the evolution of the European Social Fund (ESF) since its creation. The ESF promotes public expenditure in ALMPs in order to foster social cohesion across the EU. In order to test to what extent this strategy can be backed up by facts, we estimate the impact of public expenditure on ALMPs on the employment rate using panel data from 28 European countries (1985–2011), taking into account the endogeneity of the explanatory variables and the dynamic behaviour of their relationship. Results support the hypothesis that expenditure in ALMPs is more beneficial for employment than aggregate public expenditure. In addition, we show that periphery countries observe a larger efficiency of their ALMPs. These results support the recent policy strategy undertaken by the European Commission to raise the budget devoted to ESF in Member States experiencing higher unemployment rates.

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Although the macroprudential regulation only became a central topic of bank regulation after 2008, recognising and analysing risk, what now we call macroprudential, has formed part of the thinking about banking risk for a long time. A real turn of events was caused by the Global Financial Crisis. Since then, as a consequence of the huge taxpayers’ burden and the mutual reinforcing effect of sovereign and banking crises, the main course of bank regulation has become the elaboration and implementation of regulation with a macroprudential perspective. This article reviews the history of the international evolution of macroprudential regulation from the perspective of both the regulation’s motivations and its conceptual and practical developments. Its main focus is the development of the ideas of a macroprudential perspective on prudential policy and the way these ideas eventually led to concrete experiences with macroprudential regulatory tools. As a conclusion, the author raises the question of whether the financial system has become more stable by implementing the current form of macroprudential regulation.

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This article seeks to assess how the absorption of European the Union funds by the Polish voivodeships reflects two basic types of strategy in their allocation, i.e. the polarising and the equalising model. The analysis embraced 16 regional operational programmes (ROPs) between 2007–2013. The frame of reference adopted in the research was the centre-periphery model. Classes of peripherality were distinguished for each voivodeship, and absorption profiles of EU funds were determined for areas differing in their levels of peripherality. The goal of the article was achieved in a multi-stage research procedure ending in the construction of a synthetic index of the spatial orientation of support within the ROPs. The analysis demonstrated that the features of the polarising model tended to predominate in intra-regional policy. In most cases, however, the distribution of EU support represented a mixed model, with a shift towards the polarising one.

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has undergone notable changes by starting collaboration with the European Union (EU). Hence, this paper seeks to estimate the effects of IMF programmes on employment, with data from the EU-28 between 1993 and 2013. In order to control for selection on observable and unobservable variables, the study employs Propensity Score Matching in combination with the Differences-in-Difference estimator. Next, the robustness of the findings is checked by applying four different matching algorithms. Our paper concludes that employment decreases once a country resorts to the IMF, and this impact is still measurable after two years of programme initiation.

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During the decades after World War II, countries began shifting taxation from income to consumption. This shift has been associated with an expanding welfare state and left-wing dominance. However, the pattern is far from uniform and while some left-wing governments indeed expanded consumption taxation, others did not. This paper seeks to explain why, by exploring how experts influenced post-war tax policy in Britain and Sweden. Experts influence is crucial when explaining how the left began to see consumption tax not as a threat but as an opportunity. Interestingly, the influence of experts such as Nicholas Kaldor in Britain was different from the impact of Swedish experts (e.g. Gösta Rehn). I make the argument that the impact of expert advice is contingent on the political risks facing governments. The low risks facing the Swedish Left made it more amenable to the advantages of broad-based sales taxes, while the high-risk environment in Britain made Labour reject these ideas.

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The rapid institutional changes taking place today, including the emergence and global spread of new institutions bring to the fore the question of how new institutions develop. From the 1990s onwards, a new technical term has begun to spread in the literature: institutional entrepreneurship, reflecting the revaluation of people’s activity in institutional change. The aim of the paper is to answer the questions regarding this kind of entrepreneurship. How does institutional entrepreneurship emerge, how can we interpret and define this phenomenon? What kind of driving forces are behind it? How does it work in the real economy? The novelty of the paper is in addressing institutional entrepreneurship as the result of a special ability and activity of actors to combine different, already known elements for building up new institutions. The study introduces the characteristics of institutional entrepreneurship, using the example of the sharing economy, by contrasting sharing as an alternative to conventional market solutions. The paper also demonstrates how the institutional entrepreneurship of sharing changes its socio-economic environment, from mobilization of unused resources through perception of ownership to the increase of the growth potential of the economy.

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The goal of this article is to provide a deeper insight to the overall contribution of the export of food products to the Croatian economy and to estimate the direct and indirect impact of the international competitiveness of food producers on other domestic sectors. The authors measure the importance of the food sector by employing both the constant market share (CMS) and the input-output analysis. The results indicate that a loss in competitiveness in the Croatian food industry was the most important factor that determined the decreasing share of national companies in the period from 2009, when the global recession started, up to 2013, when Croatia joined the EU. EU membership strongly and positively influenced the performance of Croatian food exports. The negative trend regarding the share of the international food market was reversed. Besides having a direct impact on the export performance of the food industry, the international competitiveness of food producers indirectly affects other domestic companies whose products are used as intermediate inputs in the food industry. The study also presents a benchmark of results with previous research for EU countries, which rarely included Croatia before the accession in 2013. As far as output and value added are concerned, multipliers for the food industry are relatively significant and higher than the national average, and the food industry could be assessed as one of the key Croatian economic sectors.

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The free movement of persons has been one of the fundamental building blocks of European integration from the beginning. The economics behind it implies that greater efficiency can be achieved if besides goods and services, the factors of production (i.e. capital and labour) can also move freely across a common market. Nevertheless, this setup was originally designed for an economic area where internal imbalances were modest. In fact, these freedoms have serious, originally unintended consequences in the 21st-century European Union (EU) where the original condition, even if implicit at that time, no longer applies. Nicholas Kaldor had actually warned about these threats many decades ago, saying that with the development of trade, initial differences among trading regions would grow in the absence of adequate compensating policies. Most lately, two large-scale events have accelerated intra-EU divergence and, consequently, migration: the Eastern enlargements and the recent financial and economic crisis. Our study focuses on the causes and potential implications of the intra-EU migration challenge in the light of Kaldor’s legacy. Our main conclusion is that the original construct of European economic integration is not fit for the current realities in that it no longer ensures steady and balanced development across the EU.

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Nicholas Kaldor was a progressive force in economics who made several major contributions, which are well covered by other contributors to this issue in his memory. Yet, like most first generation Keynesians, he stayed within the paradigm of The Concluding Notes to the General Theory, in which Keynes claimed that provided the State intervened to manage the level of demand, the supply side of an economy could be left to the processes of perfect or imperfect competition, whereas Kalecki realised that oligopoly could influence both macroeconomic aggregates and policies. Like Keynes, he also assumed, with Ricardo, that trade was between different firms in different countries rather than recognising that capital already was multinational and that this could qualify both exchange rate changes such as that of the sterling in 1967 and his regional employment premium and selective employment tax.

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Nicholas Kaldor and János Kornai are known in the academic literature as the most principled and unyielding opponents of the neoclassical, mainstream economics in general, and the Arrow-Debreu General Equilibrium Theory (GET) in particular since the beginning of the 1970s. Nevertheless, they remained in the minority camp with their views until today. The mainstream of the economic profession still holds that only the neoclassical paradigm offers a comprehensive, systematic, consistent and, above all, mathematical (hence “scientific”) description of how modern economies operate. This paper aims at investigating why these two prolific writers, who were friends and spoke the same mother tongue, did not find a common ground and did not even try to build a school of followers jointly.

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After a monetary reform in 1946, the Communists helped by Jenő Varga and the Social Democrats advised by Nicholas Kaldor each drafted an economic reconstruction plan introducing central planning. Having already campaigned for economic planning after the war, Káldor was also in favour of a Keynesian income and fiscal policy. Good trade relations with the Soviet Union were in his eyes a precondition for economic recovery and stability. But the non-participation of Hungary in the Marshall Plan weakened the authority of the Social Democrats vis-à-vis the Communists who were now pressing for a Soviet-type planning system and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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This paper reports the results of an econometric examination on the links between labour productivity and output growth for 22 countries (for which long-term data are available). It turns out that, generally, labour productivity does not “cause” output. In more cases, the causation seems to be running in the opposite direction: from output to productivity. This finding, though inconsistent with the “mainstream” ideas on the sources of long-term economic growth, is reminiscent of the classical Kaldor-Verdoorn Law. The progressing slowdown in output growth on the global level, initiated around the mid-1970s (when the process of discarding the earlier economic policy paradigms set in), may have been mirrored by the progressing slowdown in productivity growth (and that despite the hardly disputable acceleration of technological progress).

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The productivity slowdown in European countries is among the major stylised facts of the last two decades. Several explanations have been proposed: some focus on demand-side effects, working through Kaldor’s second law of economic growth (also known as Verdoorn’s law), others on supply-side effects determined by a misallocation of the factors of production, caused either by labour market reforms or by perverse effects of financial integration (in Europe, related to the adoption of the euro). The latter explanation is put forward by some recent studies that stress how low interest rates brought about by the monetary union may have lowered productivity by inducing capital misallocation. The aim of this paper is to investigate the robustness of the latter empirical findings and to compare them with the alternative explanation offered by the post-Keynesian growth model, which instead emphasises the relation between foreign trade and productivity, along lines that go back to Adam Smith. To do so, we use a panel of industry-level data extracted from the EU KLEMS database, comparing these alternative explanations by panel cointegration techniques. The results shed some light on the role played by the single currency in the structural divergences among euro area member countries.

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This article celebrates the life and work of the Hungarian economist Nicholas Kaldor, and particularly his emphasis on industrial structure and the role of demand in determining the growth performance of nations.

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From the second half of the 20th century, a set of emerging economies have undergone a remarkable developing path. During the first years of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) were only slightly affected by its negative impacts. However, after 2013, a considerable growth slowdown period has evolved in these countries with the exception of the Indian economy. In the current study, we examine whether the growth dynamics of the BRICS economies shows significant correlation with the fluctuation of commodity prices, especially in the case of raw materials. Besides applying a cross correlation model on the quarterly commodity price indices and real GDP growth data, the research also focuses on the export structure of the selected fast-growing countries. As a closing element of our paper, a brief analysis is carried out regarding the correlations of growth patterns within the BRICS economies.

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This paper deals with the effects of political decentralisation on economic growth in Spain, an issue that has generated heated debates in recent decades. Our analysis of the last three and a half decades, a period characterised by the weak narrowing of the income per capita gap within regions, does not offer conclusive results on convergence and points to the importance of alternative factors. Several proxies were used to capture the decentralisation process. We also studied some potential interactions between decentralisation and other variables. All in all, our empirical evidence shows robustly that transferring more responsibilities to subnational governments does not significantly affect growth in any sense.

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The paper surveys the challenges of researching soft concepts in economics through focusing on trust. Although there is increasing evidence about its importance for macroeconomic outcomes, tensions with the homo oeconomicus model as well as the difficulties of conceptualization and measurement imply significant difficulties for research. The paper argues that comparative economics with its systemic analysis and traditional openness to interdisciplinary approaches is particularly well-suited for resolving these challenges, and it could also provide a contribution to trust research through integrating macro-, meso- and micro-level analysis.

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I summarise Kaldor’s “stylised facts” approach to economics through the lens of his 1966 inaugural lecture at Cambridge, “Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth of the United Kingdom”. I then defend this approach as a way of preventing economics from ossifying into pure formalism, fielding objections stemming from the Lucas critique, the advancement of econometrics, and the argument that stylised facts must depend on some prior theory. Finally, I argue that modern economics could benefit not only from his “stylised fact” approach, but also from his speculative boldness and substantive contributions to economic theory.

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This paper explores the relationship between inequality and sustainability both of which are dominant considerations today. Inequality was an important preoccupation of Kaldor, although he was not concerned with sustainability, as this has only recently become an all-important issue. The paper identifies relevant criteria for determining the desirable distribution of incomes from a sustainability perspective, including considerations of justice and of instrumentality. It concludes that justice demands much greater equality of emissions (and incomes) among individuals, given that the total “safe” global emissions of carbon dioxide are limited. Instrumental considerations are not so clear-cut, as evidence suggests that sometimes greater inequality leads to reduced emissions. However, meta considerations, including motivations for pursuing economic growth and conditions likely to realise international agreements on restraining emissions, suggest that more equality within and between countries is needed to promote sustainability.

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In this paper we sketch a theory about the role of supernatural beliefs in incentivizing “good” behavior among children by parents. We present a simple theory on the production and the use of certain supernatural beliefs by parents to influence their children’s behavior. A prime example of this is the idea of Santa Claus and the idea that Santa Claus rewards children according to how well they have behaved during the year. We show that under standard conditions parents face a time inconsistency problem when trying to incentivize their offspring. We claim that the production of beliefs in certain supernatural or quasi-supernatural persons who allegedly have infinite lives can help parents discipline their children. Finally, we extend this logic to a community and its ruler or rulers. We show that rulers can have incentives to influence the beliefs of their subjects. This incentive is greater whenever the ruler is a monopolist and when he or she expects to rule for a long period. Rulers with limited ability and/or superior technology for producing beliefs will also supply more supernatural stories to enforce their rule.

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Acta Oeconomica
Authors:
Tibor Czeglédi
,
András Simonovits
,
Endre Szabó
, and
Melinda Tir

A basic problem with the ever-changing Hungarian retirement rules has been that they created excessive shares of gainers and of losers. Certain workers with long (and continuous) employment could retire well below the normal retirement age (NRA) with full benefit. Other workers, with fragmented and therefore short employment had to work until reaching the ever rising NRA. A peculiar consequence of these rules is the strong negative correlation between the retirement age and the length of contribution. Moving in the direction of a fair system, like the Nonfinancial Defined Contribution system, would improve sustainability and fairness.

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The article introduces a research that examined the impact of family on the cooperation of individual family members in family-owned businesses by applying a theoretical framework based on family therapy, family business research and social value research. Firstly, it presents a model based on blending family therapy and social research on the individual’s value preferences with the aim of exploring the internal structure of this family effect. It also shows a possible family business consulting method in order to observe and handle the dynamics of this internal structure. Then, testing of the described model and consulting method is conducted by multiple-embedded case study research. Based on the results, refining statements are formulated regarding the applicability of family therapy in family business consulting and social value research.

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This paper analyses the pricing of sovereign risk and contagion during the crises in the Central and Eastern European countries. Panel data are used to estimate the determinants of government bond spreads in three different time periods: before the crisis, during the global financial crisis, and during the European debt crisis. The econometric model includes interactions between the explanatory variables and the crisis dummies. This specification enables the coefficients to change during the crises. The empirical analysis confirms a statistically significant relationship between sovereign risk and macroeconomic fundamental variables. Additionally, the results suggest an increase in the importance of macroeconomic fundamentals during the financial crisis. The analysis also supports that sovereign credit ratings and exchange rate risk have a significant impact on government bond spreads.

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