The Hungarian Economic Association (MKT) has so far proposed more than seventy specific measures to the government action group responsible for restarting the economy to eliminate and mitigate the economic damage caused by the coronavirus, and to restore and restart the economy after the pandemic.
The government has recently set up 10 action groups to deal with the crisis. The action group responsible for the restart of the economy is led by Andrea Bártfai-Mager, Minister without Portfolio for the Management of National Assets, a member of the MKT. The Minister indicated that she is relying on the Hungarian Economic Association, the knowledge and intellectual capacity of the more than 3,000 members of MKT, to develop the necessary measures and action plans as soon as possible; that is why she invited MKT President, Gyula Pleschinger, to the action group on behalf of MKT. The sections of the Hungarian Economic Association are constantly collecting and formulating their proposals – each in its own sector – on minimising the economic damage caused by the coronavirus as much as possible and in relation to resuming growth. MKT has already submitted more than 70 of the proposals formulated so far to the action group led by Andrea Bártfai-Mager.
The MKT package of proposals states that the most urgent task is to preserve jobs and ensure the survival of worthy small and medium-sized enterprises, as these are the conditions for a successful relaunch. In this area, monetary policy has a relatively narrow margin of manoeuvre: by providing liquidity to the interbank market, targeted loan and bond programmes and loosening macro-prudential regulation, it has created the conditions for the financial sector and businesses to overcome the crisis. To move forward, one can now rely primarily on fiscal policy instruments.
Based on the above, most of MKT’s proposals so far – especially those requiring immediate intervention – are related to the retention of jobs, the creation of new jobs, the provision of a healthy workforce, and the field of freight transport and logistics. The medium- and long-term proposals, which look at 1-6 months, and the long-term proposals mainly concern the SME sector, startups, the IT sector, the necessary redeployment of EU funds, and agriculture and the food industry, but economic policy proposals affecting the world of demography are already being prepared.
(Opening image: Gyula Pleschinger, President of MKT, Minister Andrea Bártfai-Mager and Éva Hegedüs, Secretary General of MKT, at the 57th Roaming Conference of Economists, Nyíregyháza)