When politicians debate public spending, the numbers thrown around are in the hundreds of millions, even billions of euros. Few of us have any real, personal frame of reference for sums that large. Billions are simply too abstract to picture, let alone reason about — and as a result, we lose track of what things…
How much does an employee really cost? It's a question every employer eventually has to answer - and, on a larger scale, a telling indicator of a country's competitiveness. Yet the "super-gross wage" so often cited in Slovak debates is not the same thing as the true cost of employment. Labor law loads employers with…
Bureaucracy Index is a simple and transparent quantification of the proverbial “red tape”, which is mentioned daily in media, but rarely in any quantitative terms There are several existing competitiveness rankings around, that comprehensively assess the quality of law enforcement, infrastructure and tax law from a business perspective. In Bureaucracy Index, we decided to keep…
Economic and financial literacy remains a subject that receives too little attention in Slovak schools. Yet young people encounter economic challenges early in life - paying bills, taxes, and interest, and regularly facing inflation, price regulations, or misinformation on economic topics. That is why INESS – the Institute of Economic and Social Studies organizes the…
Every autumn since 2022, INESS has brought together some of Slovakia's most curious young minds for four intensive days of economics, critical thinking, and genuine debate. In 2026, INESS is organizing the 5th edition of the Economic Base Camp. The camp packs a weekend's worth of ideas, workshops, and networking into four intensive days, combining…
Since 2017, INESS has been hosting Econtalks (Ekonomické reči) - a series of informal economic discussions held in relaxed, pub-like settings in Bratislava. What started as a handful of casual evenings has grown into a genuine tradition. To date, we've organized 40 Econtalks on topics ranging from monetary policy and cryptocurrencies to the EU budget,…
