Energy services at local and national level in the transition period in Hungary

Energy industries are mainly organised at national level in Hungary, however local governments have their specific role in the system. Local governments have been major performers in the first period of the transition process: they were entitled to receive 25 per cent of the shares in electric utilities and 40 per cent of the shares in gas supply during the privatisation process. They did not build up long standing portfolios in these utilities. They became more important players at district heating, where they have a contradictory triple function - owner, regulator and provider of the local social safety net. Local governments are also in the forefront of the energy saving programmes

Versenyellenes magatartás, egyenlőtlen feltételek a teljes postai piacnyitást követően

This paper assesses the potential distortive impacts of state aids and of incumbent firms' market behaviours and business strategies on competitive outcome. The problems emerged within the framework of the third postal directive, the unresolved questions of regulation and the contradictions between postal and other regulations are analyzed in the first part. The second part describes the most typical anti-competitive practices. The third and fourth part discusses the effects of state aids and mergers in the postal sector, finally the Hungarian competition issues are examined

Vállalkozás, vállalatelmélet, vállalattörténet : Arthur Cole, Alfred Chandler és Ronald Coase–változatok „paradigmateremtésre"

Anglo-American and Hungarian economic historians follow different semantic patterns describing the same subjects. While the authors writing in English use three distinct terms to signify business history, entrepreneurship and the theory of the firm, the corresponding Hungarian words share a common root. This paper reviews the debates among the founding fathers of the discipline about how to define the agenda and methods of researching these topics both before and after World War II. The emergence of business history at Harvard Business School under the leadership of N. Gras mainly followed the German tradition of narrative historical economics. He denied any dominant role of formal economic theory and urged business historians to use several other disciplines (psychology, politics) too. The founder of Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard, A. Cole based the approach of his research group on the Schumpeterian concept of creative entrepreneur as the key figure in explaining the different issues of economic change and development. Faced with the problem how to identify what is entrepreneurship, the Center failed to formulate a theory of economic change based on entrepreneurial activity and behaviour. In the meantime the character of creative entrepreneur have been played down within organization and firm and was substituted by the entrepreneur co-ordinator (R. Coase) who directs production and by the middle-manager (A. Chandler). Both the business history using structuralist-functionalist sociological approach in discussing large scale enterprises and the theory of firm based on transactions costs and economic analysis of law remain outside of the mainstream of history and economics. What they had in common was a sense of affinity for empirical data instead of pure theory. Even it was more than affinity, it was a desire to get insight of the "real world"