Industrial Restructuring in the Budapest agglomeration

The major 'motor' of the recent Hungarian industrial development has been foreign direct investment, particularly by multinational companies. This has stimulated the development process, as shown by the dynamism of production, exports and profitability of industry in Budapest. On the other hand, this has also led to a split of the industrial sphere into its foreign and domestic sections, or into foreign-owned companies and domestic SMEs. The major question asked in this project is where is Hungarian industry heading and will the gap between the contracting domestic part and the foreign multinationals continue to widen or will they be joined in a much more favourable scenario. Barta sees this as a question of whether Hungary can avoid the 'dead-end street' of South Asian industrialising countries, and instead move towards a new Eastern European or Hungarian model. He concludes that Budapest industry does not follow any given model and indeed its development probably cannot be seen as a 'model' proper in itself, but is, or will be, a mixture of different elements. This would be a welcome fusion of Hungary's rich human resources of accumulated knowledge with foreign direct investment. Budapest would play an exceptional role in such a process, as the gateway for foreign output to the rest of the country. The share of industry in the Budapest economy will continue to decrease, but it will become a more modern and profitable sector. It will also fulfil a technological transfer role between the developed world and the Hungarian countryside (or even a larger region of central and eastern Europe). Barta predicts that Budapest industry will develop a special structure, with a large subcontractor network supporting the large foreign enterprises, and alongside this industrial districts formed by SMEs.

Estimating the Size of the Homeless Population in Budapest

Since 1990, the issue of homelessness has become increasingly important in Hungary as a result of economic and structural changes. Various suggestions as to how the problem may be solved have always been preceded by the question "How many homeless people are there?" and there is still no official consensus as to the answer. Counting of the homeless is particularly difficult because of the bias in the initial sampling frame due to two factors that characterise this population: the definition of homelessness, and its 'hidden' nature. David aimed to estimate the size of the homeless population of Budapest by using two non-standard sampling methods: snowball sampling and the capture-recapture method. Her calculations are based on three data sets: one snowball data set and two independent list data sets. These estimators, supported by other statistical data, suggest that in 1999 there were about 8000-10000 homeless people in Budapest.

The Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary

This study describes the sociolinguistic situation of the indigenous Hungarian national minorities in Slovakia (c. 600,000), Ukraine (c. 180,000), Romania (c. 2,000,000), Yugoslavia (c. 300,000), Slovenia (c. 8,000) and Austria (c. 6,000). Following the guidelines of Hans Goebl et al, the historical sociolinguistic portrait of each minority is presented from 1920 through to the mid-1990s. Each country's report includes sections on geography and demography, history, politics, economy, culture and religion, language policy and planning, and language use (domains of minority and/or majority language use, proficiency, attitudes, etc.). The team's findings were presented in the form of 374 pages of manuscripts, articles and tables, written in Hungarian and English. The core of the team's research results lies in the results of an empirical survey designed to study the social characteristics of Hungarian-minority bilingualism in the six project countries, and the linguistic similarities and differences between the six contact varieties of Hungarian and Hungarian in Hungary. The respondents were divided by age, education, and settlement group - city vs. village and local majority vs. local minority. The first thing to be observed is that Hungarian is tending to be spoken less to children than to parents and grandparents, a familiar pattern of language shift. In contact varieties of Hungarian, analytic constructions may be used where monolingual Hungarians would use a more synthetic form. Mr Kontra gives as an example the compound tagdij, which in Standard Hungarian means "membership fee" but which is replaced in contact Hungarian by the two-word phrase tagsagi dij. Another similar example concerns the synthetic verb hegedult "played the violin" and the analytic expression hegedun jatszott. The contrast is especially striking between the Hungarians in the northern Slavic countries, who use the synthetic form frequently, and those in the southern Slavic countries, who mainly use the analytic form. Mr. Kontra notes that from a structural point of view, there is no immediate explanation for this, since Slovak or Ukrainian are as likely to cause interference as is Serbian. He postulates instead that the difference may be attributable to some sociohistoric cause, and points out that the Turkish occupation of what is today Voivodina caused a discontinuity of the Hungarian presence in the region, with the result that Hungarians were resettled in the area only two and a half centuries ago. However, the Hungarians in today's Slovakia and Ukraine have lived together with Slavic peoples continuously for over a millennium. It may be, he suggests, that 250 years of interethnic coexistence is less than is needed for such a contact-induced change to run its course. Next Mr. Kontra moved on to what he terms "mental maps and morphology". In Hungarian, the names of cities and villages take the surface case (eg. Budapest-en "in Budapest") whereas some names denoting Hungarian settlements and all names of foreign cities take the interior case (eg. Tihany-ban "in Tihany" and Boston-ban "in Boston). The role of the semantic feature "foreign" in suffix-choice can be illustrated by such minimal pairs as Velence-n "in Velence, a village in Hungary" versus Velence-ben "in Velence [=Venice], a city in Italy", and Pecs-en "in Pecs, a city in Hungary" vs. Becs-ben "in Becs, ie. Vienna". This Hungarian vs. foreign distinction is often interpreted as "belonging to historical (pre-1920) Hungary" vs. "outside historical Hungary". The distinction is also expressed in the dichotomy "home" vs. "abroad'. The 1920 border changes have had an impact on both majority and minority Hungarians' mental maps, the maps which govern the choice of surface vs. interior cases with placenames. As there is a growing divergence between the mental maps of majority and minority Hungarians, so there will be a growing divergence in their use of the placename suffixes. Two placenames were chosen to scratch the surface of this complex problem: Craiova (a city in Oltenia, Romania) and Kosovo (Hungarian Koszovo) an autonomous region in southeast Yugoslavia. The assumption to be tested was that both placenames would be used with the inessive (interior) suffixes categorically by Hungarians in Hungary, but that the superessive suffix (showing "home") would be used near-categorically by Hungarians in Romania and Yugoslavia (Voivodina). Minority Hungarians in countries other than Romania and Yugoslavia would show no difference from majority Hungarians in Hungary. In fact, the data show that, contrary to expectation, there is considerable variation within Hungary. And although Koszovo is used, as expected, with the "home" suffix by 61% of the informants in Yugoslavia, the same suffix is used by an even higher percentage of the subjects in Slovenia. Mr. Kontra's team suggests that one factor playing a role in this might be the continuance of the former Yugoslav mentality in the Hungarians of Slovenia, at least from the geographical point of view. The contact varieties of Hungarian show important grammatical differences from Hungarian in Hungary. One of these concerns the variable use of Null subjects (the inclusion or exclusion of the subject of the verb). When informants were asked to insert either megkertem or megkertem ot - "I asked her" - into a test sentence, 54.9% of the respondents in the Ukraine inserted the second phrase as opposed to only 27.4% in Hungary. Although Mr. Kontra and his team concentrated more on the differences between Contact Hungarian and Standard Hungarian, they also discovered a number of similarities. One such similarity is demonstrable in the distribution of what Mr. Kontra calls an ongoing syntactic merger in Hungarian in Hungary. This change means effectively that two possibilities merge to form a third. For instance, the two sentences Valoszinuleg kulfoldre fognak koltozni and Valoszinu, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni merge to form the new construction Valszinuleg, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni ("Probably they will move abroad."). When asked to choose "the most natural" of the sentences, one in four chose the new construction, and a chi-square test shows homogeneity in the sample. In other words, this syntactic change is spreading across the entire Hungarian-speaking region in the Carpathian Basin Mr. Kontra believes that politicians, educators, and other interested parties now have reliable and up-to-date information about each Hungarian minority. An awareness of Hungarian as a pluricentric language is being developed which elevates the status of contact varieties of Hungarian used by the minorities, an essential process, he believes, if minority languages are to be maintained.

The Hungarian Economic Elite After the Political Transition

Erzsebet Szalai (Hungary). The Hungarian Economic Elite after the Political Transition. Ms. Szalai is a research fellow in the Institute of Political Sciences in Budapest and worked on this project from July 1996 to June 1998. In the period following the political changes of 1989, the leading forces of the economic elite have gained increasing superiority over the political and cultural elites, with the clear ambition of putting the latter to their service. The power relations within the economic elite were characterised by "a war of all against all". The desire to gain precedence over others became an openly declared value. The formation of estates and the intensification of competition became embodied in a multitude of lobbies which cropped up to assert short-term interests. After the state socialist period, possession of at least two of the social, economic and cultural forms of capital is necessary to join one of the three segments of the elite: political, cultural or economic. What defines the ability of the members of the three elite groups to assert their interests is their ability to convert any of the three types of capital into another. That is to say, the basis on which they can retain and extend their position is "symbolic capital" as interpreted by Bourdieu. The concept of symbolic capital is useful for describing the power relations following the collapse of state socialist systems and societies. In the state-socialist system, the political, economic and cultural spheres are tightly interwoven, and this interpenetration slackens only slowly after the system's disintegration. A close institutional relationship between the three spheres continues to make it easier for power actors to convert social, economic and cultural capital from one type to another. Symbolic capital, or the easy transfer between the three spheres, in turn reproduces the institutional relationship, or more precisely, complicates the separation of the three spheres after the fall of state socialism.