György Vida (p)

Richárd Farkas

In today has a digitalizing global economy, competition between regions and settlements is intensifying across borders. In addition, in the recent period, two world economic crises emerged in different ways. One was the global financial crisis and another was the global social and economic challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the period between the two shocks, the world was characterized by economic prosperity, but it can be stated that the competitiveness of the given regions and its analysis over time play an important role in the issue of post-crisis recovery. This is no different in the United States, the European Union, and, within it, in Hungary. It can be stated that the regional competitiveness in Hungary between 2010 and 2020 showed marked spatial patterns, which needs to be analyzed.
Consequently, the aim of the study is to examine the spatial patterns of competitiveness and income disparities in Hungary for the period between 2010 and 2020 and to shed light on some aspects and their interrelations. To identify spatial and social processes, I formulated research questions and I analysed these questions with mathematical statistics and geoinformatic methods. The study concludes that there is an important geographical difference in the performance of the areas and the income living in Hungary, which was influenced in different ways by different economic, spatial, and social factors between 2010 and 2020. At the same time, a decrease in spatial differences can be observed, as well as a kind of increase in income disparities in societies that are geographically differentiated. In addition, the changes that took place between 2010 and 2020 in the spatial pattern of the regional revealed competitiveness of Hungary were outlined.

Marina Savai (p), Gabor Bodnar (p), Ferenc Mozsar, Izabella Szakalne Kano

György Vida

In the first decade following the regime change of 1989-90, our country faced numerous economic and political challenges. Apart from the dominance of state privatisation, the ‘90s can definitely be described as the decade of transition. The performance of the Hungarian economy reached the pre-transition level by the turn of the millennium, besides, during this period the labour market and the structure of economic sectors changed substantially. On account of this, we considered it worthwhile to examine how the economic structure of our country developed after the decade of transition and what territorial specificities it is characterised by. Moreover, in investigating the productivity of each sector, the international literature draws the conclusion – which is sometimes easier and sometimes more difficult to explain – that among the developed OECD countries, productivity has not increased in the past decades.
In our work, we study the spatial transformation of the Hungarian economic sectors from 2000 to 2019. We conduct it by dividing the examination of the change of productivity into an “inter-sectoral” and an “intra-sectoral” element in our paper. We regard the analysis a relevant research question in general as well, but a special curiosity is offered by the global financial crisis of 2008 occurring at “half time” of the studied period, which we evidently consider as a structural discontinuity. The framework of the analysis is provided by the national counties (NUTS3 regions), we conduct our analysis in this context. It can be established that the primary factor of the productivity growth of the studied NUTS3 regions is the increase of performance within the sectors, i.e., it can be attributed to their development rather than to the shift in the economic structure of the counties. In several cases, the structural change takes not only a smaller value but a negative one. It indicates that the economic structure of the counties has shifted from the higher-productivity sectors towards the ones with lower productivity.

Richárd Farkas (p), Anett Uhrin, Dániel Kehl

Gabor Bodnar

Recent researches emphasize the role of how costs are passed through into prices. However, there is no straightforward consensus, many researchers and competition authorities have the viewpoint, if ,rockets and feathers" occurs in an industry, it is evidence for price maker behavior of firms. The present paper investigates the changes in cost pass-through rates of firms in response to the local market power changes caused by the merger of two branded chains on the Hungarian retail gasoline market. Applying the ECM regression technique and difference-in-difference estimation strategy, on the one hand, we provide evidence that the relationship between cost pass-through asymmetry and local market power is not obvious. On the other hand, we also show that asymmetry of firms' cost pass-through increased with the acquisition.