Unofficial Economic Activities and Fiscal Discipline in Hungary as Mirrored in Consecutive Enterprise Surveys on Tax Behaviour

The paper focuses on a segment of the hidden economy, i. e. on unofficial (unreported) economic activities of registered medium and large enterprises in Hungary. First we place the problem into a broader context, then we delimit those segments of unofficial economic activities our surveys are able to catch. The data from our 1996,1998 and 2001 enterprise surveys put us into a unique position: we are able to analyse the dynamics of some components of the hidden economy during the transition. Our surveys focus on the everyday practice of tax evasion and tax avoidance (including some of the various methods and techniques enterprises use to diminish their tax liabilities). These methods include underreporting activities and revenues, exaggerating (over-reporting) costs, using outsourcing to small subcontractors in order to provide “tax-efficient” labour, tailor-made remuneration packages to take advantage of loopholes, etc. While some of the tax planning methods clearly remain within the realm of legality, others may include tax dodging of the illegal kind. The borderlines between avoidance and evasion are necessarily blurred. We also deal with some other aspects of fiscal discipline and tax compliance and enterprise behaviour (tax delays, tax litigation, etc .). Our data unanimously support the hypothesis that the importance of unofficial economic activity of registered medium and large enterprises radically diminished since 1996. As we also have information about the selected enterprise group’s opinion on the unofficial activities of their business partners and main domestic competitors, our data enable us to generalise this finding to the whole registered business sector.

The State, International Agencies, and Property Transformation in Postcomimmist Hungary

This is the published version. Copyright 2002 University of Chicago Press.This article challenges evolutionary accounts of property transformation in postcommunist Hungary, which hold that novel property forms based on interenterprise ownership have emerged in that country. It shows that private property has emerged as the predominant category of ownership in Hungary and explains the rapid diffusion of private ownership by focusing on the actions of the state and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Following the collapse of communism, state actors in Hungary promoted the domestic accumulation of capital by subsidizing the sale of state enterprises to private parties, particularly enterprise insiders. Pressures from international agencies ultimately forced government officials to abandon this policy, however, and to conform to a neoliberal model of the state that allowed direct foreign investment. The conclusion considers the capacity of states to intervene in economic processes in an environment increasingly dominated by suprastate agencies

A Cloud-based Machine Learning Pipeline for the Efficient Extraction of Insights from Customer Reviews

The efficiency of natural language processing has improved dramatically with the advent of machine learning models, particularly neural network-based solutions. However, some tasks are still challenging, especially when considering specific domains. In this paper, we present a cloud-based system that can extract insights from customer reviews using machine learning methods integrated into a pipeline. For topic modeling, our composite model uses transformer-based neural networks designed for natural language processing, vector embedding-based keyword extraction, and clustering. The elements of our model have been integrated and further developed to meet better the requirements of efficient information extraction, topic modeling of the extracted information, and user needs. Furthermore, our system can achieve better results than this task's existing topic modeling and keyword extraction solutions. Our approach is validated and compared with other state-of-the-art methods using publicly available datasets for benchmarking

Ownership Structure, Business Links and Perfor-mance of Firms in a Transforming Economy The Case of Hungary

This study concentrates on the analysis of the characteristics of the ownership and business links existing between the enterprises; the effects of business links and financial discipline on the effectiveness and growth capability of enterprises, as well as the changes which have taken place since 1992 in the performance of Hungarian enterprises. The author regard financial discipline (the breach of payment obligations toward the partners or in the delayed payment of taxes) a very important indicator in that how safe the business links of a company can be considered. The results show that the occurrence of liquidity problems in itself has a significant effect on the breach of financial discipline. The absence of firm’s growth increases the chance for breach of financial discipline and the foreign-owned companies are better protected against the looser payment discipline of the partners. The results also confirm the better growth capability of foreign companies. If companies which are related by ownership links also establish business links, then the closer business links make better growth dynamics probable. Companies, which are each others' suppliers within a company group usually, achieve a faster growth than the rest of the companies. The analysis of tax returns shows that we are not talking simply of the temporary good influence of the transition from state-ownership to private ownership but we can emphasize a certain type of private ownership, that is, foreign ownership, which significantly improves the performance of the companies. According to the results, the contributions to the value added do not show a positive effect of privatization. The better performance of privatized (between 1993–1996) companies measured by the value added to employment in 1996 is not the result of privatization, but other technological, organizational influences or business conditions, which were in effect even before privatization.

ENHANCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THERMAL WATER CONSUMPTION VIA HEAT PUMPING

Renewable technologies and the extension of their scope of usage basically has to face the general obstacles like any other novelties newly introduced to the market. In the case of environmentally friendly and clean technologies we must consider another critical aspect: the knowledge and the trust of the potential future users. To influence these people first we must extend their knowledge regarding renewable energies so they will be able to change their own approach about them. Usually the most crucial factor is the economic efficiency which determines the attitude of the majority of the users. Even the ones whose decision making process is highly based on the environmental patterns. In the case of any technology, the economic aspect is significantly influenced by its operational effectiveness. So this analysis – besides the direct economic matters – aims to examine how the performance of thermal water heating in greenhouses can be improved by using heat pumping

Volatile anaesthetics inhibit the thermosensitive nociceptor ion channel transient receptor potential melastatin 3 (TRPM3)

BACKGROUND: Volatile anaesthetics (VAs) are the most widely used compounds to induce reversible loss of consciousness and maintain general anaesthesia during surgical interventions. Although the mechanism of their action is not yet fully understood, it is generally believed, that VAs depress central nervous system functions mainly through modulation of ion channels in the neuronal membrane, including 2-pore-domain K+ channels, GABA and NMDA receptors. Recent research also reported their action on nociceptive and thermosensitive TRP channels expressed in the peripheral nervous system, including TRPV1, TRPA1, and TRPM8. Here, we investigated the effect of VAs on TRPM3, a less characterized member of the thermosensitive TRP channels playing a central role in noxious heat sensation. METHODS: We investigated the effect of VAs on the activity of recombinant and native TRPM3, by monitoring changes in the intracellular Ca2+ concentration and measuring TRPM3-mediated transmembrane currents. RESULTS: All the investigated VAs (chloroform, halothane, isoflurane, sevoflurane) inhibited both the agonist-induced (pregnenolone sulfate, CIM0216) and heat-activated Ca2+ signals and transmembrane currents in a concentration dependent way in HEK293T cells overexpressing recombinant TRPM3. Among the tested VAs, halothane was the most potent blocker (IC50 = 0.52 ± 0.05 mM). We also investigated the effect of VAs on native TRPM3 channels expressed in sensory neurons of the dorsal root ganglia. While VAs activated certain sensory neurons independently of TRPM3, they strongly and reversibly inhibited the agonist-induced TRPM3 activity. CONCLUSIONS: These data provide a better insight into the molecular mechanism beyond the analgesic effect of VAs and propose novel strategies to attenuate TRPM3 dependent nociception.status: publishe