It was recently reported that the Hungarian government is also trying to pave the way for battery recycling plants by amending the law, and the Minister of Economy has been persuading several battery recycling companies in South Korea and China to invest in Hungary. According to a statement from the…

Over the past two decades, China's share of the world economy's total FDI stock has grown rapidly. While in 2000 the country's share was negligible, by 2023 it accounted for nearly 7% of the total stock, according to UNCTAD data. This rapid growth contrasts with the stagnating share of the other…

By Andrea Éltető Over the past year, battery waste has been in the Hungarian news mostly because of illegally dumped discarded batteries. Iklad, Abasár, Mocsa, Salgótarján, Sárbogárd – in these cities thousands of tons of hazardous batteries were dumped in abandoned buildings and old factories, in…

The COVID-19 crisis (epidemic and economic crisis) provided a challenging time for European governments. Since the coronavirus reached the European continent and member states of the European Union, the position of the Hungarian government regarding the main issues and challenges of the European…

Climate Central has stylized the horror of rising yearly average temperatures into aesthetically appealing warming stripes, subtly reminding the broader public of the deteriorating climate of our Globe. Although, I am not sure if we need reminding, given rising levels of climate anxiety. The climate…

Norwegian students organised their largest strike to date on 22 March, when thousands walked out of school to protest the government’s climate agenda. Joining them in Oslo, I found that like their peers globally, they have come to realise the need to voice their concerns in a country that has been…

In the past few months, Huawei has become a target of harsh criticism in many Western countries. From the United States and Canada all the way to Australia and New Zealand, policymakers fear that the Chinese telecommunications giant will abuse its dominant market position as the biggest provider of…

A preliminary assessment on foreign investment screening in Hungary In the past couple of years, Chinese companies have steadily increased their economic presence and expanded their investment portfolio in the Central and Eastern European region. While cooperation between CEE countries and China is…

Chinese companies have increasingly been targeting Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in the past one and a half decades, while diplomatic relations are also on the rise. This development is quite a new phenomenon but not an unexpected one. On one hand, the transformation of the global…

All eyes were on the 2018 NATO summit, as President Trump was poised to wreak havoc during his time in Brussels. He started his Wednesday by taking a swing at Europe’s most controversial mega-project, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The President’s goal may be to leverage the project in pressuring…

All Visegrad countries (i.e. the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland) have decreased their structural budget deficits below 3% of GDP by 2014 and, consequently, exited the Excessive Deficit Procedure – corrective arm of the Stability and Growth Pact of the EU. The external pressure from…

The main objective of the paper published in the latest issue of Studies in Agricultural Economics (see:  Hegedüs Zsuzsanna - Kiss Judit.: The impact of ten years of European Union membership on Hungarian agricultural trade. In: Studies in Agricultural Economics Vol. 116, 2014. p. 87-94.) was to…

The aim of understanding welfare state developments has been of great interest in comparative social policy. These analyses mainly focus on affluent capitalist democracies excluding the former socialist states. Recently the formation and development of the welfare state among East Central European…

Slow progress within the EU Eastern Partnership (EaP) program and disappointment of all affected partners can be explained by both problems arising on the EU and the Eastern Partners’ side. Besides recent economic difficulties, diverging member state interests and approaches including the ‘South…

As a consequence of the current financial and economic crisis, the EU and the US are in the midst of fundamental institutional and regulatory changes. Appropriate regulatory responses given to recurring crises are persistent problems of capitalism. In the period of economic upturn preceding the…

On the long term the increase of the world population will peak at 9 billion people according to the latest projections from the United Nations. This raises the problem of the regional and age dispersion of the population. Mid-term calculations show that until 2050 Europe will lose its current…

In what follows Future Forests’ LULUCF researchers David Ellison, Mattias Lundblad and Hans Petersson report on the results of a panel that was organized and held at the annual Conference of the Parties meeting (COP18/CMP8) in Doha, Qatar. Panel Introduction In the context of the UNFCCC…

Hungary is a small and open economy depending on foreign capital and exports. As far as geographical distribution, structure and the size of exporting companies are concerned, Hungarian export is concentrated. The share of the European Union in Hungary’s exports (imports) was 76% (70%) in 2012.…

Due to photosynthesis, forests and forest products play an important role in climate change mitigation. In Sweden the annual gross removal from living tree biomass is currently about 165 Million Metric tons of CO2-equivalent (MtCO2e) per year. This can be compared to the reported net emission from…

On the 9 December, 2012, the Social Liberal Union (Uniunea Social Liberală, USL), the center-left alliance led by Prime Minister Victor Ponta won the Romanian parliamentary elections with a landslide victory. The official results from the electoral commission were even more convincing of the…

One of the most shocking consequences of the recent world economic crisis was the considerable contraction of world trade: though the growth rate of world merchandise trade had been slowing down since 2006, the lowest point was reached in 2009 when the volume of world trade decreased by 12.1%…

Within the MAPS programme on Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and South Africa are considering the potential role of forests in their overall climate change mitigation action plans. The most recent MAPS meeting addressing the role of forest took place…

64.1% of the global population, age 15-74, was ‘active’, i.e. worked or was looking for work in 2011. Their number decreased by 29 million over the four years of the crisis. The activity rate of the cohort under 25 is even smaller (48.7%). Moreover this rate has been declining for many years,…

Considering both its economy and population together, Brazil represents the 6th largest country in the world. The country is one of five new major players in the global economy referred to as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries. The last several decades of development…

Greece has been rocked by the crisis more than any country in the Eurozone. Almost every important bit of socio-economic data is worse than for any other member of the group of 17 Euro-member states. Greek GDP has fallen 17.4% since the beginning of the crisis. In 2013 the outlook is expected to…