Academic literature on the topic 'Hungarian Central Bank'

On the one hand, economic sustainability depends on an environmentally friendly and energy-saving economy, though it rather means the continuous functioning of businesses and the national economy, which is expressed in the balance of accounting, foreign trade and budget balances. On the regulatory side, monetary policy, alongside fiscal policy, serves ensuring economic sustainability, as the main objective of central banks is to ensure price stability and maintain financial equilibrium to underpin continued economic activity. However, in our energy crisis-ridden world, there is an increasing emphasis on energy-efficient, environmentally friendly management. The focus of our study is on the environmental sustainability context of Hungarian fiscal and central bank tools, with a particular focus on the legislative and programmatic elements of the green economy development of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (Hungarian National Bank, hereinafter: MNB).

In the 17-18th century, during the process of civil transformations, starting from the economic policy based on the era of absolutism, the first central bank regulations appeared in Europe. Mainly the disorganization and crisis of public finances and the need to finance various wars led governments to establish central banks and to provide central banking functions to privately owned banks. The most important issues included the regulation of banknote issuance and legal tender, the management of state funds, the financing of the state debt, as well as the relationship with the state, in other words, the content of central bank independence. Each country followed different paths, and accordingly, the classic and the Prussian models of central bank development can be described based on the different legislative steps. The study presents the main characteristics through the English, German, French, American and Hungarian examples, primarily by characterizing the legislative peculiarities and illuminating the political historical background by applying the methods of comparative law.

The revolutionary rise of digital financial innovations has heralded a new era in the operation of the banking system and central banks, which has brought about the digital transformation of money. Central banks must respond to challenges profoundly affecting and transforming the financial system. Central banks have been exploring the introduction of central bank digital currency (CBDC), in order to promote stability and sustainable development, to preserve competitiveness and to bolster the effectiveness of their monetary policies. In addition to smooth operation, the preservation of sovereignty and the effectiveness of the monetary policy also need to be ensured. Along with its expected advantages, the paper also discusses the risks relating to CBDC. CBDC appears in the international financial system, generating competition among global currencies. The rivalry between the dollar, the euro and the yuan may alter positions in the global financial system. A rearrangement of international power relations is at stake. Against this background, the paper also provides insight into Hungarian news on preparations for the introduction of CBDC.

It was almost exactly one hundred years ago, on 24 June, 1924, that Hungary’s independent central bank, the National Bank of Hungary, began its operations. Our editorial staff commemorates this anniversary by republishing a lecture given by one of the most eminent financial economists of the time, Gyula Domány, at the Hungarian Economic Society before the adoption of the law on the central bank. In our view, the article is worthy of attention not only from an economic history point of view, as many of its conclusions provide important lessons for today.

The role of central banks in shaping economic processes has been a key issue since their existence. This has typically always been related to the challenges faced by monetary policy decision makers at the time, and from the 2000s onwards even more so in the decade in question. In our essay, we focus primarily on the challenges facing Hungarian monetary policy, briefly outlining the developments in the past decades and elaborating on the challenges ahead. In the longer term, as a small, open economy, Hungary must respond to the prevailing and often interconnected international megatrends of the decade, assessing which of these developments represent challenges and which of these provide opportunities for the Magyar Nemzeti Bank to solve the challenges. In an era of geopolitical change, the green transition, demographic change, high debt levels and digitalisation, one thing is certain: central banks cannot lose sight of their primary objective of ensuring price stability.

In order to provide an accurate description of developments in the Hungarian motor third-party liability insurance (MTPL) market, as well as to inform the public and stimulate competition, the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (the Central Bank of Hungary, MNB) has elaborated an index to indicate the MTPL premium level. The method offers a comprehensive picture of changes in average premiums, as it uses data from the central itemised MTPL database to cover not only the population switching insurers but also remaining contracts and new entrants. It reduces bias due to seasonal effects and trends by eliminating changes in the stock composition. It can also illustrate how much the premium has changed in relation to the change in the magnitude of claims, taking into account the estimated average change in claims. In our study, we present the statistical and methodological considerations used in the calculation of the MTPL index and describe the relevant characteristics of Hungarian MTPLs.

In this article we investigate how the public communication of the Hungarian Central Bank’s Monetary Council (MC) affects Hungarian sovereign bond yields. This research ties into the advances made in the financial and political economy literature which rely on extensive textual data and quantitative text analysis tools. While prior research demonstrated that forward guidance, in the form of council meeting minutes or press releases can be used as predictors of rate decisions, we are interested in whether they are able to directly influence asset returns as well. In order to capture the effect of central bank communication, we measure the latent hawkish or dovish sentiment of MC press releases from 2005 to 2019 by applying a sentiment dictionary, a staple in the text mining toolkit. Our results show that central bank forward guidance has an intra-year effect on bond yields. However, the hawkish or dovish sentiment of press releases has no impact on maturities of one year or longer where the policy rate proves to be the most important explanatory variable. Our research also contributes to the literature by applying a specialized dictionary to monetary policy as well as broadening the discussion by analyzing a case from the non-eurozone Central-Eastern region of the European Union.

In view of the still underdeveloped capital market in Central and Eastern Europe, modernizing enterprises particularly depends on a functioning banking sector. Due to the interdependence enterprises and banks the insolvency of individual enterprises set off chain reactions which resulted in the collapse of banks and shook the banking systems in some countries. Commercial banks were particularly susceptible to these developments since the ratio between their own fluids and enough experience in reorganizing enterprises nor business perspectives for the enterprises depending on them. In the past years the individual states have made different degrees of progress in reorganizing their commercial banks. Two policy patterns become manifest: Estonia very consistently closed insolvent banks and opened markets for foreign banks and newly developing private banks. Thus the Estonia state considerably reduced its own share in the banks. Latvia also tried to increase its banks orientation towards profitability by opening the market and reducing state shares. The other countries, by contrast, primarily improved capital endowment of the existing banks. Between 1992 and 1995 Polish, Hungarian and Slovene governments realized extensive recapitalisation. While Poland increased the registered capital of important commercial banks, the Slovene and the Hungarian governments also bought nonperforming loans from the banks for state bonds. Hungary then increased the registered capital of the big state-owned banks. In 1994. and 1995. respectively partial recapitalisation took place in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Neither Latvia nor Bulgaria nor Lithuania have until now succeeded in stabilizing their banking systems. In the Czech Republic which similar to Estonia opened the market, leading to the emergence of about 60 banks, the central bank has hitherto intervened in 12 banks facing liquidity problems or insolvency. In the Slovak Republic a far-reaching consolidation of banks is also still due. The governments in Bulgaria and Lithuania presently intend to increase the banks capital by state bonds, while the Latvian central bank refrained from direct intervention after the collapse of Banks Baltija and only intensified control of the banks activities.

In 2008, Hungary was heavily hit by the global financial crisis, and had to turn to the IMF among the first. The paper analyses the road leading to the post-Lehman liquidity crisis from the point of view of Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB), the central bank of Hungary. Based on the minutes and the press releases* of the Monetary Council (MC), a comprehensive account is given why the puzzle was put together too late.

The role of corporate bonds has expanded globally in the past decade, as they are an ideal financial instrument both for diversifying the liability structure of issuing companies and managing investors’ portfolios. An adequately developed, liquid corporate bond market has a beneficial effect on the functioning and transparency of the market mechanisms of the economy and can also strengthen the crisis resilience of the financial system. Several studies have shown that – in addition to the normal functioning of companies – the issue of corporate financing is also important in crisis management, as uncertainty during a crisis has a negative impact on the liquidity of bank lending, limiting companies’ funding options. In such a situation, it is therefore vital that companies can also rely on other forms of financing. Recognising this in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 economic crisis, central banks in a number of countries launched bond purchase programmes in order to start supporting the expansion of the corporate bond market. Thanks to the Bond Funding for Growth Scheme (BFGS) of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (the Central Bank of Hungary, MNB), the Hungarian corporate bond market now offers a realistic financing alternative to bank loans for a wide range of companies.

Depuis les années 1990, les banques centrales consentent des efforts considérables en matière de communication et innovent dans les manières de transmettre leurs discours : l'ancien paradigme du secret a progressivement fait place à celui de la transparence. Toutefois, l’augmentation de la complexité de la politique monétaire, notamment en raison de la crise financière, remet en question la crédibilité des banques centrales, posant ainsi de nouveaux défis en termes de communication. En effet, les instituts d'émission voient leur influence et leur autorité considérablement renforcées, mais leur acceptation par le public est de plus en plus mise à l'épreuve, avec une perception de moins en moins favorable.Parallèlement, la crise économique a favorisé l'émergence de mouvements populistes à travers le monde. Les mouvements nationalistes et/ou protectionnistes, faisant suite à la crise remettent en question le paysage politique traditionnel. C'est notamment le cas de la Hongrie, dont l'appartenance à l'Union Économique et Monétaire confère à sa banque centrale un rôle singulier dans la coordination entre sphères économique et politique, tant au niveau national que supranational, ce qui soulève des interrogations sur son indépendance. Ainsi, ce travail vise à mettre en perspective ces tensions entre des objectifs qui peuvent sembler contradictoires
Since the 1990s, central banks have made considerable efforts in terms of communication and have innovated in the ways they convey their message: the old paradigm of secrecy has gradually given way to that of transparency. However, the increasing complexity of monetary policy, particularly as a result of the financial crisis, has called into question the credibility of central banks, posing new challenges in terms of communication. The influence and authority of issuing institutions have been considerably strengthened, but their acceptance by the public is increasingly being put to the test, with perceptions becoming less and less favourable. At the same time, the economic crisis has encouraged the emergence of populist movements around the world. In the wake of the crisis, nationalist and/or protectionist movements are challenging the traditional political landscape. This is particularly the case in Hungary, whose membership of the Economic and Monetary Union gives its central bank a unique role in coordinating the economic and political spheres, both at national and supranational level, raising questions about its independence. The aim of this is to put into perspective the tensions between what may appear to be contradictory objectives

This dissertation analyzes the emergence of the Austro-Hungarian Bank (OeUB) as a modern lender of last resort (LLR) between 1868 and 1914. In order to evaluate policy responses to specific periods of financial distress, an in-depth knowledge of the context and dynamics at hand is indispensable. Chapter I sets the groundwork for this dissertation. It shows that bank failures during the Austro-Hungarian crisis of 1873 followed mainly from the break-down of a large repo market on the Viennese stock exchange. Credit institutions granted repo loans against securities that turned into highly illiquid and depreciated collateral. Banks that were forced to sell repossessed collateral in response to heavy funding withdrawals had to write-off substantial portions of their repo portfolios and thus incurred heavy losses. This chapter reinterprets the Austro-Hungarian crisis of 1873 as a historical "run on repo". It is the first study to examine a historical repo market crisis using microdata. I use semi-parametric survival analysis as well as stratification techniques new to the literature on bank distress to identify the causes of bank failures. Bank failures in 1873 did not spring from a pure liquidity problem, nor did they derive from a simple solvency shock. The complex roots of bank distress in 1873 posed difficult questions for policy-makers who needed to decide whether and how to intervene. Although central banks may be first-best candidates for the role of a LLR, they can also face constraints which obviate an elastic supply of liquidity during crises. Some of these constraints may be ideational, institutional or technical. Others are driven by market characteristics: quantity rationing can be the result of asymmetric information problems in financial markets. In Chapter II, I study a historical experiment implemented to overcome the specter of a credit rationing LLR during the Austro-Hungarian crisis of 1873. I explore bank-level information on treatment by a LLR mechanism designed as a public-private partnership between the central bank and market players. Drawing on inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) to tease out the causal effect of liquidity support, I show that this unconventional LLR was effective in mitigating bank distress: it worked as a remedy for the under-provision of a good particularly desirable in times of crises central bank liquidity. No matter how successful it is in calming financial distress and independently of the concrete form it takes, the LLR always comes at a cost. Moral hazard is a central issue in the literature on last resort lending. In Chapter III, I provide a new explanation for how central banks dealt with moral hazard historically. I focus on one specific component of central banks' risk frameworks: credit limits for discount window customers. I argue that credit limits as operationalized by the Austro-Hungarian Bank (OeUB) after 1878 constituted the backbone of an early form of microprudential regulation that was designed to check moral hazard in normal times. Credit limits empowered the Austro-Hungarian Bank to enforce minimum liquidity and capital standards for its counterparties at the discount window. Rather than contradicting the tenet of free lending in times of distress, credit limits functioned as "contingent rules": enforced in normal times, limits were increased or lifted during liquidity crises perceived as exogenous. Moreover, even during crises, the Bank did not simply relax limits for all credit institutions: it differentiated between banks depending on their fundamentals prior to the crisis. Chapter III provides the first economic interpretation and empirical analysis of the credit limit frameworks employed by central banks in the past.

This dissertation thesis consists of three essays on new EU foreign exchange markets (FX), i.e. the Czech koruna, Polish zloty and Hungarian forint. In the first two essays, the impact of foreign macroeconomic news announcements and central banks' monetary policy settings on the value and volatility of examined exchange rates is analyzed. In the third chapter, the conditional comovements and volatility spillovers on new EU FX markets is examined. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the existing empirical literature by providing new evidence of the examined currencies during periods, which have not been examined yet (after the Global financial crisis (GFC), during the EU debt crisis and during currency interventions in the Czech Republic). The first essay (Chapter 2) examines the impact of Eurozone/Germany and US macroeconomic news announcements and monetary policy settings of the ECB and the Fed on the value of new EU member states' currencies. It is a complex analysis of 1-minute intraday dataset performed by event study methodology (ESM). We observe different reactions of exchange rates in pair with the US dollar on the US macroeconomic announcements and Euro-expressed FX rates on Germany macro news during the EU debt crisis and after it. We also provide evidence of leaking news, showing...

This essay contemplates playfulness, levity, and freedom of spirit in relation to Hungary, freedom, and the burden of history. Ban argues that one of the most enduring stereotypes of U.S. culture in Hungary (and elsewhere in Europe) is precisely its supposed “lack of reflection,” its lack of depth, its “childishness,” and its overall unserious nature. Moreover, she writes about Hungarian intellectuals as typically deploring the “Americanization” of their culture and their history. Debates have ensued and are now even being revived with the launch of Fateless, a Hungarian cinematographic memorial to the Holocaust based on Imre Kertesz’s book that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. But Ban focuses on examples where the assumed congruence of Americanization and postmodernism can be detected and actually seen as problematic. As she sees it, the problem of Americanization in Central/Eastern Europe goes beyond the simple paradox of “particularism within the U.S.” versus “global Americanization elsewhere.”

This essay is a response to Ban’s contribution in Global Perspectives on the United States. Ellis asks how often it is that large, highly visible, and public monumental art is also strangely invisible as well, and notes that “Little Warsaw” (András Gálik and Bálint Havas) appearing in the Ban article makes such complexity especially central. Very appreciative of what Zsofia Ban writes in her essay, Ellis notes that the further one delves into a complex representation of “legend, social space, and locality” the more elusive the meanings become. In Ban’s case, it is especially interesting to see how a sculpture is talked about as mainstream in Hungarian representational art, by people both on the right and on the left, when it was not and had not been. “Little Warsaw” then offers American Studies a reminder of how capacious it must be in what falls within its turf, while never forgetting the complexities of imperialistic appropriation.

This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property, such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world, though only in very few European languages, and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume, Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony, which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing, which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters, this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages, including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, labial harmony in Turkic languages, and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Tungusic languages.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

Abstract Dr Peter Hardi, a Hungarian political scientist, took his first and higher degrees at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and was subsequently awarded an Academic Degree in Political Science by the Hungarian Academy. He has taught for twenty years at the Budapest University of Economics (formerly the Karl Marx University) and during the 1980s visited the United States both as a Visiting Professor at Yale and as a Research Associate at the Institute of East/West Studies in New York. In 1988, following his return to Budapest on being appointed Director of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, Peter Hardi became actively involved in the mounting controversy surrounding the construction of a major hydroelectric dam at Nagymaros, on the Danube Bend north of Budapest. This mega-project, sponsored and financed by both the Hungarian and Czechoslovak Governments, came under increasingly bitter attack from Hungarian liberals and environmentalists as soon as the process of political reform, which culminated in the ousting of the Communist regime, made free and uninhibited comment possible. Dr Hardi was appointed by the Hungarian Government to head a panel of international experts to report to Parliament on the environmental and economic implications of continuing the Nagymaros project, which had by then moved to the centre of national political debate. The ‘Hardi Report’found decisively against continuation and was largely responsible for the Hungarian Parliament’s decision, in 1989, to call a halt to construction at Nagymaros. Dr Hardi was subsequently appointed to his present position of Director of the Regional Environmental Centre for Central and Eastern Europe in Budapest; he is also a member of the Environmental Advisory Council of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Recent surge in inflation created new challenges for economic theory and policy. The reference to earlier episodes is often misleading. Traditional theories focus on demand factors like excessive money supply overheating the economy (monetary theory), wage growth and labor shortages and point to central bank responsibility. Central banks are increasing interest rates in line with their mandate in the inflation targeting framework. Current explanations point to supply disruptions and bottlenecks in basic commodities and energy markets and the geopolitical turmoil. Increasing interest rates and the austerity policy would do little to tame supply related inflation and they would risk even worsening the problem. We propose new aspects of the problem which indicate a need for new approaches in research. Inflationary tendencies are often linked to cost pressures. We point to a new aspect namely the increasing profit margins of companies. Firms with market power increase prices when they expect that their competitors will follow. Current conditions of sector-wide cost shocks support such expectations that instead of increasing market share competitors will follow the price increase. Not just the competitors but every downstream sector may also increase their prices. We extend the analysis to this aspect by using Orbis database for the Hungarian companies’ balance sheet data for the period of the period 2013-2021.

This chapter presents authors involved in Croatian politics and culture between 1848 and 1971 who advocated for Central European integration. In discussing these figures, we examine Austro-Slavism, Croatian-Hungarian unionism, efforts to create the Danube confederation (1918–1945), and the state of Central Europe during the Cold War before the crucial events of the 1980s. After the revolutionary year of 1848 shook the traditional constitutional ties between Croatia and Hungary, Austro-Slavism appeared and offered an alternative to the old Croatian-Hungarian unionism. Austro-Slavism sought to connect the Croats with other West Slavic and South Slavic peoples on the principles of linguistic and ethnic bonds, attempting to form a new political alliance on a different basis than that with the Hungarians. Different forms of Slavism, including Croatian and Hungarian nationalism, led to conflicts between Croats and Hungarians especially in 1848, but the Croatian-Hungarian settlement of 1868 revived the Croatian-Hungarian union, which had suddenly been broken in 1848. After the breakdown of the Monarchy, Emperor Charles I advocated for the restoration of the Habsburg Monarchy. As he failed to attain the Hungarian throne in 1921, his plans remained unfulfilled. A little later, his successor, the Archduke Otto von Habsburg, revived interest in the Danube confederation as a response to Hitlerism and Stalinism and its expansionism towards Central Europe and attempted to lobby the American and British establishments in favour of a Central European confederalism. These initiatives generated interest in Croatia, which was to be integrated into the project. Among those who paid closest attention to the plans were Catholic and conservative groups in exile because the Danube Confederation was to be formed on the basis of anticommunism and anti-sovietism. Due to the contest between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1948, certain circles of Croatian emigration stopped writing about the idea of a Central European Danube confederation and began to place their expectations on the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the creation of an independent Croatian state. However, the Prague Spring of 1968 and next the Croatian Spring in communist Yugoslavia brought back interest in Central European issues among Croatian emigrant circles. Already in the early 1970s, it was speculated that the Eastern Communist bloc would not be able to survive the blows of the Central European nations’ national movements. The political right and left in Croatia during the second half of the 20 th century were fiercely divided over Central European integration. While the right advocated for an independent Croatian state, which would have been open to Central European integration, the left wanted to see Croatia as an integral part of the Yugoslav state and the Balkan region. Unfortunately, due to the limited scope of the chapter, several important issues could not be discussed, such as the relationship between Croatian President Franjo Tuđman and the Visegrad Group in the 1990s during the time of democratic Croatia.

Abstract When Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles look back on their histories, they share a sense of tragedy related to those events leading up to the loss of “national freedom,” and for the Hungarians and the Poles, this feeling of loss is often intensified by reminiscences about extensive territories lost as well. If the old historical kingdoms of Poland and Hungary were “organic wholes” to the same extent that many Poles and Hungarians feel they were, the sensations they experience are akin to the phantom pain that amputees have after having lost a limb. They know that what has been lost is gone for good, but neurological quirks sometimes allow them to feel pains in the missing extremi-ties.

To understand the legal-geographical aspect of the theme indicated in the title, it is necessary to know that medieval Europe was divided north-south, roughly between the countries north and south of the Alps. The term ‘East-Central Europe’ is a modern concept and cannot simply be traced back to the Middle Ages. The legal institutions discussed in this chapter covered, to a greater or lesser extent, the territories of present-day Bavaria, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Poland. This region encompassed both European legal regions in terms of medieval ecclesiastical jurisdiction, since the German, Czech and Polish territories tended to be governed by the northern type of official jurisdiction, while the Hungarian kingdom’s canonical jurisdiction was of the southern type, vicarial jurisdiction. It is important to stress, however, that there are several combined elements of the two models of adjudication, and I will discuss these features in detail in this chapter. A separate sub-chapter will be devoted to ecclesiastical judicature in medieval Bohemia. The ecclesiastical judiciary focused on the dioceses, so organizational and jurisdictional rules are included in its main elements in the study. The more detailed section of the Bavarian judiciary presents all important litigants. When discussing institutions in Poland and Hungary, I also tried to highlight the parallels and differences that can be related to each other, and thus, the chapter engages in a comparative discussion of the institutions of ecclesiastical justice in Central and Eastern Europe, as promised in the title.

This chapter traces a number of key ideas going back to the 18th century that still condition music and thinking about it today. It largely focuses on classical music, but situates it in relation to popular culture. A distinction is drawn between ‘classical’ (small-C) and ‘Classical’ (big-C) music: Classical (big-C) music is a narrower term referring to a particular series of developments centred on Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the late 18th and early 19th centuries—developments in which Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven played a key role, and which eventually led to the idea of music as its composer’s self-expression. The chapter also traces the emergence of a very different idea of what music is and what it is for, centred around the consumption rather than the creation of music: linked to major social and technological changes, this has given rise to today’s culture of musical pluralism.

This chapter offers an in-depth look at health politics and the social health insurance-based system in Hungary. It traces the development of the Hungarian healthcare system, characterized by seismic shifts from a Bismarckian, solidarity-based social health insurance to centrally planned healthcare pledging universal access to health services as a citizen’s right. After the fall of state socialism, Hungary returned to a social health insurance model, and since then the main policy efforts have focused on decentralization, strengthening of private provision and entrepreneurship, and financial consolidation of the health system. After the highly contested and ultimately failed attempt to introduce managed competition and user fees between 2006 and 2008, there has been a shift back to an increasingly centralized system with tax-based financing. As noted in the chapter, the consequences of recentralization for the solidarity, accessibility, affordability, and quality of healthcare in Hungary are still to be seen.

The protection and adjudication of fundamental rights have been playing an increasingly important role in the legal systems of Western countries since the end of World War II. However, the early origins of fundamental rights go back well over two millennia. The theories of fundamental rights first appeared in the legal system of the ancient empires. The Code of Hammurabi in the ancient Babylon articulated the first requirement for fair trial as it provided that unfair judges be fined and removed from their positions. The Torah first revealed by Moses (c.1304–1237 bce) also contained provisions on the prohibition of false witnesses. The first human rights document has been claimed to be the Charter of Cyrus from 539 bce because the word ‘rights’ specifically appears therein. However, the modern concept of human rights that the state is for the people and not the other way around began to take root at the end of the eighteenth century. After their first appearances, the historical development of fundamental rights has taken place either through an organic and gradual process or as a result of independence or revolutionary movements. Different phases of this development can be distinguished, which involved the rights of the noble, limitation of the power of absolute monarchies, and individual and collective rights. The development in England is an example of the former where the power of monarchs were bound by law and rights as early as the adoption of the Magna Charta Libertatum in 1215. The subsequently created Petition of Right (1628), Habeas Corpus Act (1679) and Bill of Rights (1689) are gradual fulfillment of the historic path of rights. In the CEE region, Hungary underwent similar organic development with the adoption of the ‘Aranybulla’ in 1222, which set constitutional limits on the power of the monarch and granted rights to the Hungarian nobility. In contrast to this type of gradual expansion, in other countries, the recognition and codification of fundamental rights were the result of cataclysmic events such as an independence movement or revolutionary war, e.g. in France or in the United States. It must also be mentioned that while national constitutions served as the cradle of the modern conception of fundamental rights, they began to enjoy the protection of international law with the adoption of the UN Charter (1945) along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). This so-called ‘normative revolution’ marked a major turning point in the development of both human rights law and international public law. However, the universality of human rights, instead of standardising rights, would allow – and also require from – states to implement these rights according to the national, historical, cultural and religious traditions of their respective communities. Consequently, the primary places of nurturing and protecting fundamental rights remain within the states and local communities. Accordingly, not only individual rights in the abstract but also the institutions and control mechanisms that serve to protect them are embedded and shaped by the various histories, traditions and legal cultures of the states. In numerous countries – such as the United States of America, Australia, Japan or the Scandinavian countries in Europe – ordinary courts are empowered to conduct a ‘judicial review’ to protect rights enshrined in the constitution. This type of ‘judicial review’ was first applied by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803 as part of the system of checks and balances, whereby the judicial branch serves as a check on the legislative as well as on the executive. In other countries – such as those in continental Europe – a separate and centralised institution – the Constitutional Court – is responsible for conducting fundamental rights adjudication. This chapter aims to provide a comparative analysis on the historical path, major institutions and mechanisms of fundamental rights adjudication in countries of the CEE region. To this end, it first outlines the concept, function, characteristics as well as the institutions of fundamental rights adjudication along with the aspects of limitation of fundamental rights (Section II). Then, it turns to the countries of the Central European region. This chapter aspires to provide a comparative overview about the unique characteristics of the systems of each country’s fundamental rights’ adjudication and concludes with a short assessment (Section III).

The main role of central counterparties is the clearing and settlement of trades. In order to fulfil this role, they need to maintain financial resources to cover losses due to customer defaults. One element of these resources is the initial margin requirements. In this paper the authors have analysed whether a change in the value of the margin was followed by a significant change in the market liquidity of the most liquid Hungarian stock – the OTP Bank Group – during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Market liquidity is measured based on the daily traded volume. The results show that in most cases, no changes in the abnormal daily traded volume are seen on the market following a margin change, which means that no evidence has been found that margin changes and traded volume are related. This result is good from a practical point of view, because it means that the activity of the central counterparty did not negatively affect the liquidity of the market during the COVID-19 period.

In 1333 Pelješac came under the rule of the Republic of Dubrovnik, which carried out the first known division of the peninsula. The land was divided among the Dubrovnik nobility and serfdom relations were imposed on the local population, which lasted until the time of the Austro-Hungarian administration. The subject of this paper is research into the urban development in Kuna Pelješka, the central settlement of Pelješka Župa. Two main types of buildings can be distinguished in the present settlement, which has lost its original urban structure over time. The first type appears in the 15th century, at the time of the Dubrovnik Republic. At that time, settlements were built according to certain rules laid down in the Statute of Dubrovnik and other laws on building. The second type dates back to the 19th century, the time of Austria-Hungary, and is closely related to the improvement of the economic power of the local population, i.e. the flourishing of trade and shipping.

This article deals with spa tourism in Slovakia and its importance for health care, tourism, and the economy. Slovakia has a rich history of spa tourism dating back to the Hungarian state. The spa industry forms an important part of public health care and also has an important role in tourism. Spa towns often form the centres of economic, cultural and social activity in Slovakia. The spa industry and spa tourism are also of economic and socio-political importance. There is a competitive struggle between European countries in the field of spa and spa tourism. Spa establishments are trying to attract younger clients and to improve the quality of the services provided. However, there is outdated and stagnant legislation which hampers the development of spas. The article also discusses the economic problems associated with staffing and innovation of spa businesses. The analysis of the spa tourism environment in Slovakia is carried out by means of a scoring system, which will enable the establishment of priorities for improvement in this area.