Gyula Pleschinger, a member of the Monetary Council of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, was elected President of the Hungarian Economic Association (HEA) for another three-year term at its General Assembly on Friday. Éva Hegedüs, Chairman and CEO of GRÁNIT Bank Zrt., will continue to serve as Secretary General of the association, which is 129 years old this year and has more than 3,000 members.

The delegates of the 28 sections and 17 county organisations of HEA also elected new board members in the person of Előd Takáts, professor, rector of the Corvinus University of Budapest, president of the Monetary Policy Section of HEA, and Gabriella Soós, assistant professor at ELTE, research fellow at BGE, secretary of the Heves County Organisation and secretary of the Trade Section of HEA. László Andor, former EU Commissioner, Associate Professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest and Secretary General of the European Progressive Studies Foundation, was elected Vice President of the Association. The Assembly of Delegates unanimously elected the outgoing members of the Board, Péter Balázs, professor at CEU, former EU Commissioner, former Foreign Minister, and Tamás Halm, Editor-in-Chief of the Economic Review, former Secretary General of the HEA, as honorary members of the Hungarian Economic Association.

At the Delegates’ Meeting held at the Corvinus University of Budapest, the participants also adopted the annual report of the HEA as a public benefit association. Evaluating the professional work of the association, Secretary General Éva Hegedüs said: in addition to the plenary sessions and sessions of the Itinerant Meeting in Szeged, HEA organised around 80 conferences and round tables, mostly online or hybrid form, in 2022. The association’s YouTube channel now has almost 1,500 subscribers, and more than 40,000 viewers was registered last year from 16 countries around the world. HEA’s podcasts are also growing in popularity: in 2022, the Association published 107 podcasts, representing more than 7,000 minutes of professional content across the seven major podcast providers.

In his speech, President Gyula Pleschinger assessed the past three years of the Presidency. He emphasised that the social position of the HEA has also been strengthened in the past period. The association has on several occasions tried to help the government in its crisis management work by making economic policy proposals in the context of the pandemic. The HEA is present in the National Economic and Social Council, has an active cooperation with the Hungarian Rectors’ Conference, is represented in the Anti-Corruption Working Group of the Integrity Authority and provides expert support to the working groups monitoring the efficiency of public spending on health and social services.

Speaking about the functioning of the HEA, Gyula Pleschinger pointed out that the association welcomes around 200-250 new members a year. He remembered that the HEA’s Monetary Policy and Innovation Sections had been established. In recent years, the cooperation agreements concluded with V4 economics societies have been successfully filled with content: in autumn 2022, for example, HEA hosted the international final of the Economics Olympiad. The good cooperation with the Hungarian economic associations in the Carpathian Basin has also continued: in the framework of this cooperation, the Pénziránytű Foundation delivered around 4,000 Hungarian-language textbooks aimed at developing financial awareness and financial literacy to 39 Hungarian schools beyond our borders free of charge in the autumn of 2022.

The re-elected President of the HEA reminded the delegates that Eger will host the 61st Hungarian Economists’ Congress on 21-22 September 2023, the largest annual event of the Hungarian economics profession.