INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STUDIES

The Economics Olympiad was launched in 2017 with a participation of 4,000 high school students. This year, the competition enjoyed even more popularity with more than 5,300 contestants overall.

Crumbled and scattered parcels, inaccessible fields, frauds with farming subsidies, and problems with floods and droughts – this is the reality of Slovak agriculture. Extreme fragmentation makes it impossible to use land efficiently.

Unfortunately, innovation appears also in the field of taxation. Several East European countries have been flirting with various forms of a “retailer tax”. A tax similar (but not equal) to VAT, or the sales tax. Its proclaimed aim is typically to “punish” international retail chains, who have been repeatedly blamed for problems of local farmers and local food and beverages industry. In reality, the tax primarily hits consumers.

Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) has been organizing Free Market Road Show for a few years now. It is a unique series of conferences which has been organized in more than 30 capital cities across Europe and Caucasus.

Slovakia was once the reform tiger that used to set the example that others would lkely follow. However, that time is now certainly over. With the rise of populism, Slovak politics has recently produced ad hoc a number of negative social measures introduced to buy the support of a specific group of voters. And this time, the measure employed is even worse.

When I first heard a Smer-SD party representative talking about the intention to set the minimum wage level in Slovakia at EUR 600, I did not pay much attention to it. It seemed like a bad joke.

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.