INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STUDIES

It was late 2018, when the Slovak government approved the free lunch program for all children attending elementary schools. The supporting argument was that this measure is outreaching to poor kids who had not been targeted by previous lunch subsidies.

The Western world has come together to mourn over the newest Oxfam study. According to their calculations, 26 billionaires own as much as the rest of the people on Earth.

Long announced “retail chain tax” is taking its final shape in Slovakia. The law passed the first round of voting in the parliament and is awaiting the second voting in November. The government’s intention is to lower the market power of large international retail chains. Unfortunately, the alleged problems are mostly made-up. Instead, this tax may end up raising the food prices and wrecking havoc in Slovak retail.

Mankind has made unbelievable progress in the last one hundred years. From horse carriages to moon landings, from typhus epidemics to molecular genetics, from conservative patriarchate to gay marriages. One thing does not change though – the suspicion, or even hate towards merchants.

The Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) first introduced its Bureaucracy Index in Slovakia in 2016 to draw the attention to the amount of red tape a small entrepreneur has to overcome on a daily basis just to do business.

Not many things are as exciting to economists as a famous debate about lighthouses in England. These have long served as a fine example of a public good that needs to be provided by the state. The idea of a trader selling light from the lighthouse sounds ridiculously.

Bureaucracy Index was introduced in Slovakia in 2016 by INESS – Institute of Economic and Social Studies, to draw the attention to the amount of red tape a small entrepreneur has to overcome on a daily basis.

This was perhaps the motto for Axel Voss, the EU's copyright rapporteur, who was in charge of preparation and submission of the new European directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market.

The most important figure of the Slovak economy in the last 5 years has been the trend in unemployment. This rate had been decreasing since the first quarter of 2013 and had dropped to almost a half in the first quarter of 2018. The unemployment rate fell from more than 14% to nearly 7%.

There were over 400,000 distrains recorded in Slovakia in 2017. New websites and organizations have emerged to help people in debt. A vast majority of people do not know how much taxes they pay or how much public services cost.