Impacts of EU Accession on Hungarian Primary and Processed Agricultural Trade

In 2004, Hungary joined the European Union (EU) along with nine other Central and Eastern European Countries, causing several changes in the field of agriculture. One of the major changes was the transformation of national agri-food trade. The aim of the paper is to analyse the effects of EU accession on the Hungarian primary and processed agri-food trade, especially considering revealed comparative advantages, by using recent data. Results suggest that EU accession raised the intensity of trade contacts but had a negative impact on trade balance. Nominal values of both exports and imports increased after 2004, however, Hungarian agriculture is increasingly based on raw material export and processed food import. It also turned out that revealed comparative advantages of Hungarian primary agri-food products in EU15 remained almost constant after accession, while comparative advantages of processed agri-food products has been gradually increasing by time and even reached the satisfactory level in some cases. From the policy perspective, it is apparent that there is a need for deeper structural reforms of the Hungarian agricultural and food sector is the future.

Contradictions inherent in the management of natural and industrial disasters

These days people keep wondering whether the world is more dangerous now than it was before. Do natural disasters really happen more frequently or is it just that the damage they cause that has become greater? The situation is not quite clear. As a result of the globalizing world and advanced communication infrastructure, the number of known / reported catastrophes is relatively high, but that does not necessarily mean there has been an actual increase in frequency. The red mud spill in Hungary was a special combination of industrial and natural disasters. This is one of the reasons why it is very hard to pinpoint who is responsible for the event. Natural disasters tend to raise questions about responsibility that are different from those concerning industrial catastrophes. Interestingly enough, however, nature often plays an important role in industrial disasters. The present article is concerned with how the issues of responsibility are handled in the case of industrial disasters.