In his 1966 Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, entitled On the Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth in the UK, the Hungarian-born British economist, Nicholas Kaldor presented a series of "laws" to account for the growth rate differences between Britain on the one hand, and the more successful...

One of the intriguing questions of our times is the importance of the centralization and nationalization campaigns of the 2nd and 3rd Orbán-government carried out since 2010. In an earlier working paper - Mihalyi (2015) - I demonstrated that similar policy steps were occasionally taken in other...

The starting point of our research is Piketty (2014) who follows Marx by asserting that rents are merely one of the forms of profits, therefore they do not require separate conceptual analysis and statistical separation. Speaking of the generation of rents (as a distinctly different mechanism...

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...

This study is a natural continuation of the author fs 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...

This extended book review of Creating a Learning Society by Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald (2014) looks at the 700-page long scholarly work from a transition economy perspective. Using as a starting point Arrow's renowned concept of "learning by doing", the authors throw away the doctrines...

The protracted sovereign debt crisis within the Eurozone has given rise to new policy questions. In a paradoxical way, the dilemmas confronting the contemporary EU/EMU reformers are similar to those which Socialist planners faced 30–40 years ago. This will be illustrated by two examples: the...