We examine the competitiveness of Hungarian agriculture in relation to that of the EU, based on four indices of revealed comparative advantage, for the period 1992 to 1998. Consistency tests suggest that the indices are less satisfactory as cardinal and ordinal measures, but are useful in...

This paper examines how cooperation in an insurance game depends on risk preferences and the riskiness of income. It considers a dynamic game where commitment is limited, and characterizes the level of cooperation as measured by the reciprocal of the discount factor above which perfect risk...

The real exchange rate is said to be the single most important price in an economy. While we used to think that we knew what explained its movements (e.g., the Balassa-Samuelson effect), the recent much-cited result by Engel (1999) proposes a serious reinterpretation – i.e., nearly 100% of the...

The article analyses the duration of exports of individual products of former communist countries to the enlarged European Union (EU25) employing survival analysis. The results show that the duration of trade differs across EU10 and EU15 markets, for the majority of countries the length of trade...

A complex analytical framework, the Interactive Party state model (IPS), is offered for revealing the structural and dynamic background of opposite processes: first, the development of the communist party as a political entity into a politically monopolized regime and then to a social system;...

Our paper explores, on a theoretical level, the reason for frequent failures of rural development policies and identifies some potential improvements in rural policy making in Europe. Our approach to des/integration concerns actors, resources, institutions, knowledge, the fundamental logic of...

The paper considers two aspects of the targeting of unemployment benefit systems (a) the probability that benefit is received in the population of those unemployed on standard international criteria of search and availability, and (b) the probability in the population of benefit recipients that...

The study estimates the effect of school starting age on academic performance for Hungarian grade four students using the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" (PIRLS) and the "Trends in Mathematics and Science Study" (TIMMS). The study uses the control function approach, exploiting...

The paper considers child poverty in Hungary, a country at the forefront of the transition process. We investigate how household characteristics are associated with the incidence, persistence and dynamics of poverty among children in Hungary, looking at the years 1992-96. We find that children...

Considerable amounts of time and money are spent on job-training of school-leavers graduated from higher-education institutions. More than a half of the employees in our sample participated in job-training between graduation date (1999) and September 2000. The work in this paper considers two...