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Twenty years of EU accession: learning lessons from Central and Eastern European agriculture and rural areas
Get PDFTwenty years have passed since the first eastern enlargements of the European Union (EU). This paper assesses the impacts of EU accession on agriculture and rural regions of Central and Eastern European countries and identifies the reasons behind differences in country performance. Results suggest that EU accession brought modest convergence with established Member States. However, countries capitalised on the opportunities given by EU membership to differing extents. Specifically, the Baltic countries and Poland performed best post-accession, while Croatia, Slovenia, and Hungary witnessed much slower rates of convergence. The findings are consistent with the notion of convergence clubs, with persistent variations in catch up rates between groups of states. To explain membership of lower- and higher-speed convergence clubs, the paper identifies four sets of factors, namely initial conditions, pre-accession policy frameworks and actions, administrative preparedness, and post-accession policies
Food security and crises : evidence from the Western Balkans
Get PDFContext
The world has experienced many global shocks in recent years, especially affecting vulnerable countries, people and groups. The analysis of recent impacts helps us to better understand how to build more sustainable agrifood systems.
Objectives
This paper aims to analyse the situation and main determinants of food security in the Western Balkans in light of the recent crises to ensure higher resilience for the future.
Methods
It follows a threefold approach. First, the food security situation in the different countries was analysed quantitatively using descriptive statistics of the main indicators on a time-series basis and the main determinants of food security. Second, the results of the semi-structured interviews with local experts were presented to understand the reasons for the changing patterns of food security. Third, results were validated during a hybrid workshop.
Results
Our findings suggest that food security and food supply were stable in most cases, while a large number of small farms, rural depopulation, climate change and harmonisation of food systems were cited as the main challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic did not appear to have a serious impacted on food security, although it has certainly accelerated the restructuring within the agri-food sectors. However, the war in Ukraine has had a greater impact, particularly in terms of high price inflation and rising prices for agricultural inputs.
Conclusions
This paper analysed the food security situation in the Western Balkans in the light of recent crises. Although the region has made good progress in reducing poverty and inequality in recent decades, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine appear to have stalled or, in some cases, even reversed this progress. This paper provides a number of policy recommendations based on the results to shape future policies of the region towards higher resilience
A sportvezetők és edzők foglalkoztatáshoz kapcsolódó, a női kézilabda-játékosokra mint alkalmazottakra vonatkozó nézőpontjainak vizsgálata
Get PDFA tanulmány fő célkitűzése, hogy feltárja a kézilabdasportágban a sportolók foglalkoztatása során megjelenő „kulcstémaköröket”. A kutatás módszertani keretét primer források elemzése és kvalitatív megközelítés, ezen belül a tematikus elemzés adja. Az öt szakértői interjúból nyert eredmények egyrészt átfogó, valósághű képet mutatnak a hivatásos női kézilabdában lezajlódó, sportolói karrierhez kapcsolódó folyamatokról (pl.: a kiválasztásról) mind a sportolói, mind a sportvállalati oldalról. Másrészt rávilágítanak arra, hogy miért tekinthetők a hivatásos női kézilabdázók speciális munkaerőnek. Az eredmények négy fő téma köré csoportosulnak: a kézilabdásokkal való gazdálkodás sajátosságai, a kézilabda-játékosok, a sportszakmai szempontok, valamint egyéb befolyásoló tényezők. Ezen túlmenően a kutatás meghatározza az egyes témákhoz kapcsolódó közeg és sportolói típus értéktipizálási modelljét, amelyet a viselkedési dimenziók mentén azonosítható szerepkörökkel vet össze
Production Efficiency of Advanced Liquid Biofuels : Prospects and Challenges
Get PDFRenewable sources are becoming more critical in light of global warming and the recent energy crisis. As a renewable energy source, biofuels may play an essential role in this process, especially in the transport sector. Advanced biofuels provide a great opportunity, as their potential feedstocks do not compete with food production. Based on a systematic literature review, this study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the prospects and challenges of advanced liquid biofuels. Out of the identified 508 articles, 188 were abstract-screened, providing 67 articles for in-depth screening. Finally, 57 articles were reviewed. Although advanced biofuels are not yet economically viable, it is evident that every step of the production process can be optimized. Moreover, technological advancements, such as the use of novel catalysts and co-catalysts, nanotechnology, and genetic and metabolic engineering, offer great opportunities for enhanced production efficiency, which is key for their production to be profitable
Consequences of centralized healthcare systems : changing role and autonomy of hospital managers – insights from a Hungarian case
Get PDFPurpose
The objective of this paper is to investigate how top managers in public healthcare interpret and perceive their autonomy within a highly centralized system and how their roles and attitudes have evolved in response to centralization.
Design/methodology/approach
The research examines how increased centralization and reduced organizational autonomy affect decision-making in hospitals, employing qualitative analysis through indepth interviews with top managers. The study collected and analyzed data from 15 hospital managers in year 2015 and 2022 (eight interviews each year, one person interviewed twice), to capture changes following significant centralization efforts and the effects of the pandemic and health sector reforms.
Findings
Centralization has reduced financial and operational managerial autonomy for many institutions, leading to delays in decision-making, especially in financial matters and has also brought significant administrative and reporting burdens. Despite this, hospital managers reported retaining some professional autonomyindevelopingandmanagingtheirserviceportfolios, butthis autonomyisprimarilyoperationalrather than strategic and is limited by financial constraints.
Research limitations/implications
This study examines the Hungarian healthcare system, influenced by unique political context, which also presents a methodological limitation concerning the transferability of findings.
Practical implications
Hospital top managers’ professional autonomy is often obscured by heavy administrative and financial pressures; thus, enhancing their strategic mindset is essential.
Social implications
Policymakers should adopt a comprehensive perspective in hospital maintaining, with a particular focus on balancing financial and medical perspectives.
Originality/value
The paper focuses on an under-explored area: the organizational autonomy of hospital top management in the context of centralization efforts, delivering a message to both hospital managers and policymakers by emphasizing organizational aspects
Quartic Regularity
Get PDFIn this paper, we propose new linearly convergent second-order methods for minimizing convex quartic polynomials. This framework is applied for designing optimization schemes, which can solve general convex problems satisfying a new condition of quartic regularity. It assumes positive definiteness and boundedness of the fourth derivative of the objective function. For such problems, an appropriate quartic regularization of Damped Newton Method has global linear rate of convergence. We discuss several important consequences of this result. In particular, it can be used for constructing new second-order methods in the framework of high-order proximal-point schemes (Nesterov, Math. Program. 197, 1-26, 2023 and Nesterov, SIAM J. Optim. 31, 2807-2828, 2021). These methods have convergence rate (O) over tilde (k(-p)), where k is the iteration counter, p is equal to 3, 4, or 5, and tilde indicates the presence of logarithmic factors in the complexity bounds for the auxiliary problems, which are solved at each iteration of the schemes
Two Tales of Polarization? : How Affective and Ideological Polarization Influence Political Corruption - A Panel Analysis of 153 Countries Between 2000 and 2021
Get PDFIn recent years, there has been an increased scholarly interest in citizen (or mass) polarization and its associated socioeconomic and political consequences. Although substantial evidence supports that citizen polarization affects political (or grand) corruption through a variety of mechanisms, research remains fragmented and contradictory about the precise nature of these mechanisms. This article posits that two broad and relatively distinct types of citizen polarization—affective and ideological polarization—yield differing effects on political corruption. It was hypothesized that (1) moderate levels of affective polarization have minimal effects, whereas higher levels increase political corruption; and that (2) moderate levels of ideological polarization decrease corruption, while excessive ideological polarization leads to increased political corruption. Both hypotheses were validated through panel regressions on a sample of 153 countries with data from 2000 to 2021. The article also investigates the moderating effect of regime type. © The Author(s) 2025
Önkéntes egyszerűség Közép- és Kelet-Európában
Get PDFAz önkéntes egyszerűség olyan mozgalom, amely alternatív életmódot ajánl a válságokkal telített fogyasztói társadalomban. Az önkéntes egyszerűsítők tudatos és személyes döntés eredményeképpen váltanak életstílust, amelyben spirituális, társadalmi igazságossági és ökológiai motivációk is szerepet játszhatnak. Tanulmányomban arra a kérdésre keresem a választ, hogy vannak-e közép- és kelet-európai sajátosságai az önkéntes egyszerűség mozgalmának az ökológiai fenntarthatóság szempontjából. Ennek megválaszolásához a regionális szakirodalomáttekintés módszerét alkalmazom, a mintámba tizenhét tanulmány került. A közép- és kelet-európai önkéntes egyszerűséggel foglalkozó szakirodalmat két aspektus mentén tekintem át: az önkéntes egyszerűség posztszocialista sajátosságait és az ezen életstílushoz vezető motivációkat vizsgálom. A vizsgált tanulmányok eredményei azt mutatják, hogy az önkéntes egyszerűség olyan életstílus, amely elsődlegesen az egyén életminőségét javítja és mellékhatásként a környezetterhelés csökkentését is magába foglalja, mindez azonban nem kizárólagosan közép- és kelet-európai sajátosság. A szocialista múlt nem akadályozza az önkéntes egyszerűség meghonosodását, viszont az észak-amerikai változatától eltérő módon jelenik meg. A közép- és kelet-európai eredmények afelé mutatnak, hogy elsősorban egyénközpontúan, illetve ideológiai és kollektív motivációkat nélkülözve döntenek az emberek az önkéntes egyszerűség mellett
A hitelesség olyan, mint az oxigén – Interjú Dr. Kopits György akadémikussal, a Költségvetési Tanács alapító elnökével, a Monetáris Tanács korábbi tagjával
Get PDFA Köz-gazdaság interjút készített Dr. Kopits György akadémikussal az új argentin gazdaságpolitikáról, annak hitelességéről, fenntarthatóságáról és tanulságairól a magyar gazdaságpolitikára nézve. A MTA meghívására tartott előadást a Budapesti Corvinus Egyetemen 2024. november 12-én, ennek apropóján készült az interjú
Disclosure of belief-dependent preferences in a trust game
Get PDFExperimental evidence suggests that agents in social dilemmas have belief-dependent, other-regarding preferences. But in experimental games such preferences cannot be common knowledge, because subjects play with anonymous co-players. We address this issue theoretically and experimentally in the context of a Trust Game, assuming that the trustee’s choice may be affected by a combination of guilt aversion and intention-based reciprocity. We recover trustees’ belief-dependent preferences from their answers to a structured questionnaire. In the main treatment, the answers are disclosed and made common knowledge within each matched pair, while in the control treatment there is no disclosure. Our main auxiliary assumption is that such disclosure approximately implements a psychological game with complete information. To organize the data, we classify subjects according to their elicited preferences, and test predictions for the two treatments using both rationalizability and equilibrium. We find that, while preferences are heterogeneous, guilt aversion is the prevalent psychological motivation, and that behavior and elicited beliefs move in the direction predicted by the theory. © The Author(s) 2025