With a successful economists’ itinerant meeting, almost a hundred professional events and a move to a new office, the 130-year-old Hungarian Economic Association has had a busy year.
With three plenary sessions, a total of 22 sections, 130 speakers and an exciting and memorable economists’ itinerant meeting full of substantive debates, we have had a memorable year. The 62nd Economists’ Itinerant Congress in Nyíregyháza was a conference where the debates were full of constructive ideas. These ideas and proposals were forwarded by the HEA Board to the economic policy makers: the Prime Minister, the Governor of the Central Bank and the government ministers involved in economic issues.
In October, we had a successful FIKOT (National Meeting of Young Economists), which is also a long-standing HEA event, of which we held the forty-first in Debrecen. In addition, the participation of the Presidents of the Czech and Romanian Fiscal Councils made this year’s conference with the Fiscal Council a special success. In the first half of the year, we evaluated the past two decades of our country’s membership of the EU with a series of more than 20 conferences. Another tradition is the Economics Olympiad, which we organised for the sixth time, and the best result ever achieved by a Hungarian secondary school student in the international final in Olympia, Greece, where he came ninth, winning the gold medal.
In addition to these major events, the Hungarian Economic Association also served its members and those interested in economic affairs with almost a hundred professional events this year. Just a few interesting figures. Our most watched videos were the opening plenary session of the Itinerant Meeting with György Matolcsy, the presentation by Finance Minister Mihály Varga, our panel on a sustainable solution to the teacher shortage – and interestingly, the October presentation by our Vice President, Professor Péter Ákos Bod in Eger, which alone generated 10.5 thousand views on the HEA YouTube channel. HEA’s videos have been viewed 54,000 times on YouTube this year. We’re also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, LinkedIn – we encourage our members and interested people to follow HEA on these platforms!
In 2024, we welcomed almost 270 new HEA members, including the new President of the Fiscal Council, the Deputy Director of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, the Secretary of State for Regional Development and the Secretary of State for Taxation at the Ministry of Finance. Together with them, the Hungarian Economic Association now has around 3,500 members. A new addition is our Higher Education and Training Section, which was established a few weeks ago and is already the 29th thematic section of the Association.
Currently, there are 16 counties with a regional organisation of HEA. In recent years, the association has been able to be really strong in rural areas where there is higher education in economics and where the university or economics faculty leadership is committed to the HEA. That is why we have started to build closer cooperation and to conclude cooperation agreements with universities. First with the Hungarian Rectors’ Conference, then in Eger with the Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, and a few months ago with the Budapest Metropolitan University. These agreements have now produced tangible results in the form of successful joint conferences and presentations. And further cooperation agreements are being prepared with ELTE and the University of Nyíregyháza, but we have also started to establish contacts in this respect with the University of Pannonia and the University of Miskolc. In parallel, HEA’s youth organisations are also gaining momentum. In Debrecen and Zalaegerszeg we have traditionally had a strong youth team, in Eger it was re-established a year ago and has been very active ever since, and in Szeged we have recently strengthened our youth committee.
An important change of the year was that after almost a decade, HEA said goodbye to the Eiffel Palace Office Building, our community space that has been the venue for many memorable section meetings and roundtable discussions over the years. HEA’s new home is now located in Building B of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Eötvös Loránd University, also in the V. district, in the immediate vicinity of Kálvin Square, at 10-12 Kecskeméti u., where, in addition to the offices of the Society, we have also created a community space, where we will welcome our members and interested parties for lectures and round-table discussions from the beginning of next year.
Overall, HEA is preparing for a year in 2025 that is at least as active and eventful as 2024. Perhaps the most important of these is that the Hungarian Economic Association will hold its 63rd Economists’ Itinerant Meeting on 4 and 5 September at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém.