Gender, Work and Employment in Ten Candidate Countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Final Report. Country: Hungary

The Hungarian media shows very contradictory pictures of women today: Successful career women enjoying material well-being is one picture, while the careful mother not working outside the home, keeping together the family is another one. Between these two contradictory poles there are almost no other female actors in the media. Life produces something different. In spite of the fact that there was a big loss of jobs in 1990s, and women’s activity rate decreased while the unemployment rate increased compared to before the 1990s, woman with duel roles are still accepted and common. The first female task is looking after the family and the second one is working outside the home and earning money. In many cases there is a third role: studying in distant or evening courses. In the next chapters we go deeper into this topic. We analyse the different aspects of female labour market positions, and show some relevant characteristics of governmental parental benefits and childcare support, and examine how the new pension system effects women. We also have a quick look at trade unions and show their lack of activity around gender issues. In the labour market analysis of the position of women we use labour force surveys, institution-based labour statistics, and unemployment registers. The Appendix 1 contains short descriptions of these data sources.

Kérdőjelek a közgazdaságtanban és oktatásában = Challenges in economic research and education

Ez az esszé a teljesség igénye nélkül kísérli meg áttekinteni azt, hogy mire vezetett a közgazdaságtan világméretekben megindult és a 2008-2009. évi válság lezáratlansága miatt vélhetően évtizedes szinten zajló önvizsgálata. A tudományszak egészét egyszerre jellemzi egyfajta tartalmi kiüresedés és a társtudományokkal való erőteljesebb kapcsolatkeresés, a módszertanok és az iskolák egymás mellett élése - ami egyáltalán nem békés -, valamint a gyakorlat által felvetett kérdések elméleti általánosításának igénye. A magyar közgazdaságtan hagyományos követő szerepe megmaradt, viszont a képzésben szerzett negyedszázados tapasztalatok és az új globális kihívások lényegi átalakításokat indokolnának a mai, túlságosan egységesített képzésben. _____ This essay joins the soul-searching that has developed globally among economists since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, whose still open-ended outcomes make it likely that such self-critical reassessments will continue in the years to come. Economics is marked by the parallel existence of substantive hollowing and in-creased reliance on interfaces with neighbouring disciplines. So the plurality and none-too-peaceful coexistence of schools and methodologies is likely to persist. Similarly abundant are the attempts to theorize and generalize new phenomena in policy and business practices. Hungarian economics continues to be a follower - a trend-taker rather than trend-setter - as it was in the inter-war period. Experience has been accumulating for over 25 years in introducing Western-style higher education in economics. The increase of student numbers and steep decrease in public funding thereof call for major restructuring in curricula, institutions and teaching methods and styles alike.

The prisoners' dilemma, congestion games and correlation

Social dilemmas, in particular the prisoners' dilemma, are represented as congestion games, and within this framework soft correlated equilibria as introduced by Forgó F. (2010, A generalization of correlated equilibrium: A new protocol. Mathematical Social Sciences 60:186-190) is used to improve inferior Nash payoffs that are characteristic of social dilemmas. These games can be extended to several players in different ways preserving some important characteristics of the original 2-person game. In one of the most frequently studied models of the n-person prisoners' dilemma game we measure the performance of the soft correlated equilibrium by the mediation and enforcement values. For general prisoners' dilemma games the mediation value is ∞, the enforcement value is 2. This also holds for the class of separable prisoners’ dilemma games.