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. This year, it was the 11th conference to be held in Bratislava (Bratislava was one…
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…
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. However, it quickly became a matter of interest for the media, necessary to address. This bad joke had to…
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. Currently, approximately 60 thousand children receive free lunches. However, the number of poor kids who…
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. As renowned economist Deirdre McCloskey once wrote in her commentary to Piketty’s book on inequality: “The conviction [that capitalism is seriously defective] is acquired at age…
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. Try to imagine such a trader sailing towards every…
INESS has been organizing the Free Market Road Show, an international conference, for a number of years. It is a series of conferences, organized across Europe, from Scandinavia to Montenegro, from Spain to Ukraine. The event found its way to Bratislava in 2018 again and brought topics stirring the public at home and abroad. The Slovak part…
The eighth year of the Seminar on Austrian Economics organized by INESS was now traditionally held in the Mojmírovce manor on March 15th to 18th, 2018. Here, 29 students from various universities from all around Slovakia and the Czech Republic got together. The first evening started with a short welcoming economic quiz held by the…
Recently, the news that the General Advocate has advised the Court of Justice of the EU to recognize Uber as a standard taxi service appeared online. First, we should probably admit that the attorney was doing his job conscientiously. He examined the defined characteristics of Uber and applied them to the individual boxes of regulations…
Democracy works best alongside civil society. However, civil society is built by solving local issues without relying on the remote hands of politicians and democracy. It may sound like a paradox, but in reality, the expansion of so-called civil society requires neither politicians or more elections, nor longer electoral programs. Life in a Civil Society…
A dozen countries out of the 28 European Union (EU) members had legal limits on cash transactions in place at the end of 2015. A dozen countries out of the 28 European Union (EU) members had legal limits on cash transactions in place at the end of 2015. Portugal, the country leading with these limits,…
In the recent years, cash has earned the label of obsolescence and high cost, and become a public enemy. Restrictions on cash payments are in place in many countries around the world and an EU-wide restriction is looming. However, cash plays a number of important roles in the economy. To counter the one-sided public discussion…
