The 3 per cent Barcelona Target: A Critical Appraisal of the Failure of the Lisbon Strategy’s Knowledgebased Economy and Society Project

Ten years after the unanimous approval of the Lisbon Strategy at a special meeting of the European Council on 23-24 March 2000 in Lisbon, it will be inevitable for the European Council, the European Commission and the majority of the EU member states to face with its fi asco and to account for the reasons of their fundamental policy, governance and economic failures in 2010. The recent turbulence of the global economy offers some excuses for the underperformance of the main objectives of the Lisbon Strategy in the essential social and economic domains, like job creation, economic growth, and environmental sustainability. Negative growth rates, macroeconomic and fi nancial instability, the contraction of the internal and external markets of the European economy, drop in demand for capital investment, goods and services, sinking corporate revenues, depreciation of corporate assets, increasing private and public indebtedness, falling rate of employment, weakening social cohesion, widening social inequality, and so forth not only deprive the majority of the EU member states of fulfi lling the main objectives of the Lisbon Strategy but also drive them into worse social and economic conditions in many policy domains than they were in 2000.

A hiány újratermelése (The reproduction of shortage)

Sporadic lack of consumer articles, the housing shortage, disturbances of material supply, and shortages of investment goods and of labour may be traced back to a common main cause. Shortage is constantly reproduced by specific features of the economic mechanism. The first part of the article consists of micro-analysis, mainly of the productive enterprise. Efforts to increase production may run up against ceilings of three kinds: constraints on physical resources, constraints on demand, and the budget constraint on enterprises. It is an important feature of a system which of these constraints takes effect. Resource-constrained systems can be distinguished from demand-constrained ones here. In the former, production is limited by production bottlenecks, in the latter by buyer demand. The socialist economy in its "classical" form belongs to the former type. It is related to whether the budget constraint on the enterprise is "hard" or "soft". If hard, enterprise spending is limited by its financial scope, if soft (its losses offset almost automatically) its demand becomes almost insatiable. The second part performs a macro-analysis, showing the mechanism of "suction" with the aid of a hydraulic analogy. The enterprise sector "pumps away" reserves and surpluses of the system, mainly due to the "investment hunger" that appears in the wake of expansionist efforts. Finally the article discusses briefly the interrelations between shortage and inflation.

Work-life Balance and Gender Regime After the Economic Transition

Work-life balance (WLB) is a key issue in our societies in which there is increasing pressure to be permanently available on demand and to work more intensively, and when due to technological change the borders between work and private life appear to be dissolving. However, the social, institutional and normative frames of a region have a huge impact on how people experience work and private life, where the borders between these spheres lie and how much control individuals have in managing these borders. Based on these arguments, this editorial to the special issue Work-life balance/imbalance: individual, organisational and social experiences in Intersections. EEJSP draws attention to the social institutions, frameworks and norms which have an effect on experience, practices and expectations about work-life balance. Concerning the time horizon, this editorial focuses on the change of regime as a reference point since socialist and post-socialist eras differ significantly, although there is still some continuity between them. The authors of this introduction offer an overview of the situation in CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) based mainly on examples of Visegrad countries.