Judit Kalman

There is a growing literature on the political economy of public finance, however most of it deals with central government behaviour. Observation of the first and second generation of the fiscal federalism literature together with the political economy of intergovernmental grants and the widening literature on political budget cycles makes it obvious that although decentralization is a continuing policy trend in reality there are institutional, political factors that can increase the chances for inefficient policy outcomes. Infrastructure investment finances - at all levels of government – are especially prone to election cycles and corruption, due to high visibility, high expenditures, lobbying by special interests, possible control by politicians, yet they strongly effect long run growth prospects and productivity of a country. As a major political influencing factor affecting public finance decisions can come through the incentives of election cycles, this analysis finds evidence...

In this chapter we provide an overview of international experiences of public works. We present the motivation, goals and theoretical background of public works as a public policy intervention, the various designs of concrete public works programmes, and the main results of evaluations aimed at measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of these programmes. The chapter is supplemented with boxes which summarise the experiences of a few concrete cases in various countries (see Boxes K1.1, K1.2 and K1.3). Public works programmes were introduced in developed and less developed countries with a variety of motivations and goals. These included counter-cyclical measures or social policy, infrastructural development and disaster management aims. The programmes operated in various forms and with various target groups and programme structures. The experiences concerning their implementation and levels of success are also different.

The establishment of a local government system was a crucial element of the democratization process after the fall of communism in 1989. The first Local Government Act in 1990 intended to strengthen local autonomy and promote local democracy. A series of ...

This paper reviews the past 10 years of the Hungarian public works system in an international context. It describes changes in the system of public works over time, its various forms, its regional allocation mechanisms and the decision-making and planning process. In that respect, it explores the motivations of the key players, including the central planner, the employment service and the municipalities, as well as their interactions. The analysis is based on interviews conducted in the competent ministries, at national public works providers, the county and district offices of the public employment system and municipalities on one hand, and quantitative data analyses on the entire public works database for the period of 2011-2014, on the other hand.Originally intended to be a labour market policy tool, public works programmes assumed more significant social and municipality management functions, partly because of the extraordinary expansion of their volume. None of their functions ...

This research provides some insights on the interactions between political and economic aspects in Hungarian development policy and multi-level government financing mechanisms. By looking at the allocation of European Union Structural Funds (EU SF) in Hungary from 2004 to 2008, this project addresses if and how such development programs and financing mechanisms are influenced by political and institutional/administrative factors. The theoretical framework of the political economy of intergovernmental grants offers hypotheses that are specially relevant within the Hungarian context.

There is a growing literature on the political economy of public finance, however most of it deals with central government behaviour. Observation of the first and second generation of the fiscal federalism literature together with the political economy of intergovernmental grants and the widening literature on political budget cycles makes it obvious that although decentralization is a continuing policy trend in reality there are institutional, political factors that can increase the chances for inefficient policy outcomes. Infrastructure investment finances - at all levels of government – are especially prone to election cycles and corruption, due to high visibility, high expenditures, lobbying by special interests, possible control by politicians, yet they strongly effect long run growth prospects and productivity of a country. As a major political influencing factor affecting public finance decisions can come through the incentives of election cycles, this analysis finds evidence...

Successful leadership in local development requires not only a vision, but good communication skills, stakeholder involvement, strategic planning and coordination and popular support via public participation. Our empirical study contributes to filling the gap in the literature about the role of non-profit leadership in urban and regional development. We study the characteristics of politicians in civil society and that of civil society’s leaders in politics as a prerequisite for successful local development. For this, we draw on the survey data of 374 local politicians from four large cities in Central Europe: Prague, Bratislava, Budapest and Poznań. The research affirms that non-profit non-governmental organisations do play an important role in local development and reveals similarities in all analysed cities, though with some variance. Local political elites are identified as engaging significantly in civil society organisations, despite low levels of general trust in these countries. About two-thirds of the local politicians who took part in the survey participate actively in civil society organisations in their respective cities but not coming from a previous non-profit non-governmental organisation employment. Not only are they active, but many of them also have positions as managers or directors, or as members of the board of directors in these organisations. Although neither membership nor leadership in non-profit non-governmental organisations appears to increase a local politician’s chance of being elected, except when those are engaged in local development or environmental issues. As spatial leadership plays an important role in the construction of new agendas and identities we have also investigated the views of local politicians on decentralisation, government service provision efficiency and the importance of several local policy topics, and found some puzzling differences across our V4 cities that possibly reflect cultural differences. Non-profit leadership in urban development is a neglected topic so far in the literature, our study adds empirical results from Central and Eastern Europe, yet there is ample room for future research.

Female labour market participation is lower than male participation in each Euro-pean country, with great variance across member states. There are countries (for example Malta, Italy, Greece, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary) where the difference is striking, even though the average educational attainment of women has by now exceeded that of men. Factors affecting female employment at an individual leveland wage differences between genders--are influenced by demographic and structural effects alike, furthermore several differences stem from incentives determined by institutions, welfare systems, policies and tax regimes. The latter are described briefly in this subchapter. The access of women to employment and job opportunities is not only important for their individual financial independence, activity, parenthood, participation in public affairs and through these in a better quality of life and greater gender equality but it also has a considerable impact on better allocation of skills and thereby on economic growth.

This paper, after a brief outlook, takes stock of public policy interventions that respond to mobility flows within Europe and encourage repatriation. Due to the fact that migration, motivations for repatriation, and the characteristics of returning migrants differ from one another, the objectives and tools of government interventions intending to influence these can also vary. Brain re-gain programmes that concentrate on the repatriation of highly qualified emigrants aim to harness the skills and experiences of returnees in promoting innovation-based economic development and competitiveness. These may be programmes that focus only on the labour market or integrated programmes, based on multiple policy areas.

In this chapter we provide an overview of international experiences of public works. We present the motivation, goals and theoretical background of public works as a public policy intervention, the various designs of concrete public works programmes, and the main results of evaluations aimed at measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of these programmes. The chapter is supplemented with boxes which summarise the experiences of a few concrete cases in various countries (see Boxes K1.1, K1.2 and K1.3). Public works programmes were introduced in developed and less developed countries with a variety of motivations and goals. These included counter-cyclical measures or social policy, infrastructural development and disaster management aims. The programmes operated in various forms and with various target groups and programme structures. The experiences concerning their implementation and levels of success are also different. The labour market background of public works – the problem of the long-term unemployed and their activation The linkage of welfare provisions to public works (workfare) can only be understood in the context of activation interventions directed at the unemployed and the fight against poverty. Activation measures try to facilitate the return to the labour market of the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged groups. Earlier what was meant by activation – strictly speaking – was the size of expenditure for active measures, and in this respect, there were significant crosscountry differences in public policy practices. The crisis has renewed attention to the importance of activation, as well as to the fact that different elements of the unemployment and social benefit systems were interrelated. Thus, the efficiency of active labour market measures depends on the generosity of insurance based and social benefits, eligibility conditions and the monitoring and enforcement of these conditions, as well as on the sanctions applied in the case of non-compliance (see more on this, for example