INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STUDIES

Since 2006, most of the time Slovakia has been ruled by politicians who have emphasized the role of the welfare state. The concept of pre-election welfare packages has become more popular and has become an integral part of mainstream politics, regardless of the phase of the election cycle. The phrase ‘the state must share with the citizens’ has taken hold.

How services are funded affects their effectiveness and quality. Take meals. It makes a big difference whether the state directly funds the operation of restaurants or “merely” mandates the issuance of food stamps, or whether restaurants are funded by paying customers. Each of these models brings different incentives and feedback loops.

The Green Deal is an initiative that has – and will have – a significant economic and redistributive impact unlike anything the European Union (EU) has seen before. Its implementation will require fundamental changes in the foundations of the European economy and trillions of euros of investment. But even that may not be enough. The Green Deal envisages the introduction of technological innovations that we have not yet discovered.

The pandemic period has not been kind to some patients’ relationship with health professionals. A period of information uncertainty, spawning hoaxes. The patient with his own opinion and his own information falls under a crooked gaze.

After two pandemic years, we have once again managed to prepare, in cooperation with foreign partners, an in-person international round of the Economics Olympiad. The event was organised by the Czech Institute of Economic Education (INEV), in cooperation with the Hungarian Economic Association and with support from the Visegrad Fund.

When people say “innovative improvement”, they immediately think of cars that don’t need to be driven; medicines that cure an incurable disease or vegetables that taste like meat. But an important innovation can also be a relatively unremarkable thing, such as shortening time. For example, to get from point A to point B, or to grow fruit from a plant, or the necessary hospital stay after a surgery.

The current social package worth more than a billion euro has definitively confirmed that Slovak government is going kamikaze in the area of public finances. After all, the money is “lying on the pavement” (even though we already have the highest corporate tax rate in all of Eastern Europe), so what’s the problem? Even before the package, Slovakia already had the worst long-term sustainability of public finances in the EU.

In Slovakia, we have a problem with the drain of the brightest young people to foreign universities. If we want to solve this problem, we need to know the causes. And we can only know these if we understand how higher education works and what its real added value is.

I dare to write that the health financing situation is becoming increasingly muddled. With all three health insurance companies (allegedly) starting to cut their losses, the problem of financing Slovak healthcare has moved up a notch.