Over the past decade, increasing public debt has become one of the most important problems for the Hungarian economy, significantly constraining the room for manoeuvre for fiscal policy and in some periods even calling into question its sustainability. As a percentage of GDP, gross public debt increased in the first half of the decade, mostly as a result of the high government deficit, after which economic stagnation and the eventual recession, along with a weakening exchange rate prevented a reduction of the debt ratio with tighter fiscal policy. By the end of the decade, public debt stood at around 80 per cent of GDP, which is very high compared to Hungary’s level of economic development and to regional competitors. As a result of tight fiscal policy and the one-off impact of the transformation of the private pension system, the rate of public debt has been declining modestly since 2010, but this has also been offset by the revaluation of FX debt as a result of HUF weakening. In this paper, we discuss the factors that contributed to the historically high public debt-to-GDP ratio by the end of the 2000s and identify the different subsections of the period between 1998 and 2012 that led to this situation. We treat the consequences of high public debt separately, present a survey of international data to compare debt ratios and note the differences between Hungary and other EU member states in terms of developments in public debt during the crisis.

A tanulmany a magyar haziorvosi szolgaltatas peldajan igyekszik bemutatni azt, hogy a tokeletlen fogyasztoi informaltsag mikent fekezheti a verseny kibontakozasat. A szerzők empirikus elemzes segitsegevel vizsgaljak annak lehetőseget, hogy az informacios koltsegek hatasara a verseny intenzitasa a piac meretenek, illetve a haziorvosok szamanak novekedesevel a varakozasok ellenere nem erősodik, sőt gyengulhet. Roviden ismertetik a hipotezisuk alapjaul szolgalo elmeleti hatteret. Majd bemutatjak az elvegzett empirikus vizsgalat eredmenyeit, s megfogalmaznak nehany normativ jellegű kovetkeztetest.

A tanulmany a magyar haziorvosi szolgaltatas peldajan igyekszik bemutatni azt, hogy a tokeletlen fogyasztoi informaltsag mikent fekezheti a verseny kibontakozasat. A szerzők empirikus elemzes segitsegevel vizsgaljak annak lehetőseget, hogy az informacios koltsegek hatasara a verseny intenzitasa a piac meretenek, illetve a haziorvosok szamanak novekedesevel a varakozasok ellenere nem erősodik, sőt gyengulhet. Roviden ismertetik a hipotezisuk alapjaul szolgalo elmeleti hatteret. Majd bemutatjak az elvegzett empirikus vizsgalat eredmenyeit, s megfogalmaznak nehany normativ jellegű kovetkeztetest.

Objectives: To evaluate the effect of purchaser mix, market competition, and trust status on hospital productivity within the NHS internal market.Methods: Hospital cost and activity data were taken from routinely collected data for acute NHS hospitals in England for 1991-2 to 1993-4. Cross sectional and longitudinal regression methods were used to estimate the effect of trust status, competition, and purchaser mix on average hospital costs per inpatient, after adjusting for outpatient activity levels, casemix, teaching activity, regional salary variation, hospital size, scale of activity and scope of cases treated.Results: Real productivity gains were apparent across the study period for NHS hospitals on average. Casemix adjustment drastically improved cross sectional comparisons between hospitals. Gaining trust status and increasing host district purchaser share were associated with productivity increases after adjustment for casemix, regional salar differences, and hospital size and scope. Hospitals that became trusts during the study period were on average less productive at the beginning of the period than those that did not, and there were no significant productivity differences between trust waves at the end of the period in 1993-4. Market concentration was not associated with productivity differences.Conclusion: Further analysis is needed to deter-mine whether overall and trust associated productivity gains are transient effects, one off shifts, or self perpetuating reorientations of organisational behaviour. Hospitals may have chosen to become trusts because they anticipated being able to increase productivity. Increases in the proportions of small purchasers were associated with increasing costs. Importantly, this study could not adjust for changes in the quality of care.