This year again, the Hungarian Economic Association’s (HEA) Labour Section – in cooperation with the MunkaugyiSzemle.hu portal – has published the summaries of the Section’s 2024 professional events in e-book format. The publication can be downloaded here.
The book, which contains around a dozen conference summaries, is not without precedent: this is the fourth year that the Section has published its annual summary publication. Edited by József Bagó, President of the Labour Section, and Ferenc Munkácsy, Editor-in-Chief of MunkaugyiSzemle.hu, this year’s volume is a good cross-section of the Section’s activities over the past year.
As HEA President Gyula Pleschinger points out in the foreword to the volume, there is no doubt that the economic policy launched in the early 2010s, which focused on job creation, has now achieved its goal, with unemployment falling to around 4% – probably around the natural rate. However, regional disparities remain and the labour market as a whole has become stretched. This has become a constraint on growth. Demographic trends are not helping to address this situation. In the longer term, the only way to solve the problem is to slow down and reverse the negative demographic trends; to strengthen education, higher education and vocational training; and to boost innovation and with it labour efficiency.
The vast majority of the technical summaries presented are far more substantial than simply documenting an event,” writes the President of the HEA Labour Section in his foreword. József Bagó points out that the articles draw attention to the most interesting and controversial issues in the world of work, often with additional commentary from the participants or even the authors. All in all, therefore, they reflect a comprehensive picture of the ideas and dilemmas that preoccupied the representatives of this diverse profession in 2024, thus creating values that go beyond the work of the department.
The publication also includes YouTube and podcast links to the professional conferences and roundtables it covers, so if you want to go beyond the summary and find out what was said at a Hungarian Economic Society labour event last year, you can watch or listen to it with a click.
The publication can be downloaded for free (pdf) from this link.