Series

Since 1990, the Social Report has been presenting the most important changes in Hungarian society every two years. It publishes empirical analyses and evaluations, striving to follow the most important processes in Hungarian society. For twenty years, the costs of the volume were financed by the ministry responsible for social affairs in the government of the day. This support ceased in 2012, and we were only able to publish the previous volume with the help of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and, to a lesser extent, the National Cultural Fund. After receiving another rejection from the ministry this year, we decided to discontinue the series. However, to our great delight, we received requests from professionals and the wider intellectual community that the Social Report was very much needed for both general social awareness and education. To "test" this demand, we published a call for community funding on the TÁRKI website. It was a pleasant surprise for us that we had to stop the collection after two weeks because the cost of the volume was covered by donations from 63 individuals and 8 institutions. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them! Their quick assistance clearly confirmed that there is a need for the Social Report and that others, like us, believe it is worth pursuing. We promised our supporters that we would "prepare an analysis of the most important processes in Hungarian society and the economy, partly for the past four years and partly for the past two years."

My paper examines certain macroeconomic aspects of the European convergence (in other words, catching up) of the Hungarian economy in an international comparison from the early years of the political and economic transition to 2013. My work is related in some respects to a similar study on the same topic published in the 2008 Social Report, which I co-authored with Béla Szörfi (Oblath– Szörfi 2008), but its questions and approach differ significantly from that study. The aim of the study, which was written five years ago, was to explore the common features of the convergence of the countries that joined the European Union in 2004 and the relationships between certain characteristics of convergence. Although there were signs at the time of writing that Hungary's economic development might take a different direction from that of the countries that joined the EU with us, based on an analysis of the entire period between 1995 and 2007, our country did not stand out from the crowd: its convergence with the more developed EU member states was roughly in line with what was to be expected given its initial lag. For this reason, the approach taken in the earlier study seemed logical: if we can gain an understanding of the general trends and correlations characterizing convergence within the EU as a whole trends and correlations within the EU as a whole, as well as the specific characteristics of the new member states, we can draw valid conclusions about the conditions and prospects for domestic convergence. By 2014, this approach had clearly become unsuitable.

The previous study in this volume provides a very thorough overview of the development of the Hungarian economy, analyzing trends by examining long time series. It reviews economic performance as measured by GDP from the perspective of convergence and catching up. My paper can be considered a kind of supplementary note, which further nuances the conclusions that can be drawn from GDP trends on a few points. GDP, or more precisely, per capita GDP, is often used to compare living standards internationally, and GDP growth rates have become synonymous with development. However, over the past decade, a significant body of literature has emerged that discusses the flaws and shortcomings of this abstract statistical construct (Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi 2009; Skidelsky–Skidelsky 2012; Coyle 2014). The most influential study by Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi, for example, criticized several elements of the GDP concept, such as its insensitivity to income distribution effects (GDP can grow while the situation of the majority deteriorates) and the fact that environmental impact is not even part of the concept. I will mention two further critical elements that I will try to take into account in my analysis. First, GDP measures market production in a country, so the emphasis is on the supply side of the economy, while the well-being of the population is better characterized by income and consumption indicators.

A country's population is the result of a seemingly simple addition involving three components. Births increase the population, while deaths decrease it; migration is ultimately determined by whether the number of immigrants or emigrants is higher. Although population size is a unified concept, the magnitude of the three components mentioned above is shaped by very different mechanisms, which are only loosely connected in modern societies. Thus, when we talk about demographic processes, we must interpret and understand the development of the three components separately, and then connect their final results. Our summary deals with the development, characterization, and understanding of the first two factors, while the issue of migration is discussed in a separate study (Blaskó–Ligeti–Sik 2014) in this volume. In the last part of our study—age structure, aging—we will also consider the consequences of migration processes. This approach has a long tradition, as the concept of natural reproduction encompasses the balance between births and deaths, but we all know, and especially in modern societies we cannot ignore, that migration plays an increasingly important role in the development of the current population size and thus in the age structure. The population of Hungary was 10,588,614 on January 1, 1989, and 9,877,365 on January 1, 2014, 25 years later.

The family is one of the fundamental institutions of society, whose structure and functions are influenced by numerous economic, social, demographic, and cultural processes, and which itself has an impact on these factors. Changes in family structure are constantly taking place in society, resulting in a more diverse structure at certain times and a more homogeneous structure at others. The changes do not all go in one direction, i.e. at certain times, previous patterns return, while at other times new forms of cohabitation emerge or become more widespread, and previously characteristic family types may disappear. We can also observe different patterns in the pace of change, as some changes fit into a long, decades-long trend, while others are linked to a crisis or a rapidly booming economic environment, or to larger-scale transformations in family policies or the legal system. The theory of family pluralization has served as an interpretive framework for describing the changes in family structure that have been taking place in Western European societies since the mid-1960s. The thesis of the pluralization of family forms fits into the theory of the second demographic transition, which provides a complex interpretative framework for changes in relationships, childbearing, and forms of cohabitation (Van de Kaa 1987, 2002). The theory of the second demographic transition attributes changes in demographic behavior and family structure primarily to the emergence of new values and the spread of individualization.

Hungary has participated in major international knowledge assessments since the early 1970s, allowing us to evaluate the development of the Hungarian school system in an international context over several decades. In this chapter, we first review the development of students' knowledge in light of the most important surveys and examine how our results compare with those of other countries. In the second part, we analyze in more detail the phenomena that indicate the most serious problems of the Hungarian school system: the weak contribution of schools to reducing disparities, social inclusion, and, ultimately, improving the labor market position of disadvantaged groups. Finally, we look at the results of measurements carried out using modern technologies, which indicate that there are particularly serious problems with the quality of our students' knowledge, foreshadowing the problems of the coming years.

While in their 2008 book Social Class: How Does It Work? the authors complained that no one was researching this classic field of sociology (Lareau–Conley eds. 2008), class research and class structure have now become hot topics in sociology once again. This renewed interest is largely due to the research of Savage and his co-authors (2013) exploring British class structure. Building on the traditions of Bourdieu, their study identified three class-forming factors—economic, cultural, and social capital—and incorporated them into their model. Their findings sparked such widespread debate that the journal Sociology devoted a special section to reflections on them in its third issue of 2014. The significance of the publication is demonstrated by the fact that the Hungarian social science community also reacted quickly to the results, and GFK, in collaboration with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, prepared a study entitled Class Size 2014, which was widely reported in the Hungarian press. Using cluster analysis, the researchers identified eight classes, reporting on broad lower and narrow upper classes, with a shrinking and disappearing middle class, depicting the social structure as pear-shaped. From the perspective of this paper, perhaps the most relevant critique of the above model is the neo-Weberian critique formulated by Bradley (2014). Bradley's reflection is grouped around three points. First, he emphasizes that, in contrast to the previous mainstream view (most notably that of Goldthorpe

If our article were to appear not in the prestigious Social Report, but in the equally popular Füles Yearbook, we would add a question and a challenge to its starting point, the two panels in Figure 1: How do they differ? Find three differences between the drawings on the left and right!

There are various socio-political views in Hungary and Europe on the role of employment and cash transfers provided by the welfare state in alleviating poverty. One view is that employment is not only an essential condition for reducing or even eliminating poverty, but is itself the solution: if employment increases in a country, it leads to a reduction in poverty, and full employment may even be the key to eliminating poverty. The other view is that employment alone is not a solution to reducing poverty; to ensure that citizens' basic needs are met, minimum income guarantees that are sufficient regardless of employment status are needed. Both views are fundamentally normative in nature and are generally not or not entirely derived from empirical results. Our study, which analyzes developments in Hungary in comparison with other EU member states, attempts to present the diversity of processes, outcomes, and mechanisms of impact, and to provide points of reference for nuancing normative positions.

Although public employment plays a central role in today's labor market processes and social system, we actually know very little about it: we do not know the actual number of people in public employment, and there are several different approaches and data sets in circulation that are not comparable or only partially comparable. In our study, we attempt to bring order to the confusion based on the raw data provided to us by the National Labor Office (NMH), showing how many people were employed in public works between 2011 and 2013, and using this to interpret recent developments. First, we briefly review the changes in unemployment benefits and public employment rules in recent years. We examine the development of active labor market instruments, including the resources allocated to public employment. This is followed by a presentation of the number of people involved in public employment and the average number of public employees according to various criteria, and then we use a probit regression model to estimate the chances of leaving public employment for the primary, open labor market. Our paper concludes with a summary of the conclusions that can be drawn from the data presented.