Messze vagyunk Európától - divergencia vagy konvergencia?

Kolosi Tamás; Szivós Péter

Messze vagyunk Európától - divergencia vagy konvergencia?

It is an old and profoundly justified wish of Hungarian society to catch up with European living standards and to make up the arrears that history created.1 That is essentially what the 2018 Eurobarometer survey also expresses: 61 per cent of respondents – i.e. a rate higher than the 56 per cent EU average – feel attached to the EU and 20 per cent feel strongly attached (the corresponding EU average is 14 per cent, and in Portugal the figure is a mere 7 per cent) (EC, 2018). Hungary’s detachment from and/or convergence with the EU has become a favourite subject for politicians and journalists over recent years. Economic literature on growth recognizes two approaches to convergence. One is σ-convergence, meaning a narrowing of the spread in the levels of economic development of countries (see Dalgaard and Vastrup, 2001; Mille and Upadhyay, 2002; Lucke, 2008; Monfort, 2008; Pfaffermayr, 2009). The other is β-convergence, whereby less-developed countries approach the level of more-developed ones thanks to their faster growth (see Barro and Sala-i-Martin, 1992; Mankiw et al., 1992; Michelacci and Zaffaroni, 1998). In this chapter, we investigate the question in accordance with this second approach, but we will cover it in more than just economic terms. We embark on an analysis of long-term tendencies. Our main question is: have we come any closer to the European economy and European living standards since the regime change, or do the data justify the detachment theories? Gábor Oblath’s 2014 article (Oblath, 2014) reviews economic performance – measured by GDP – from the point of view of convergence. Our paper may be viewed in many ways as a kind of extended supplementary note which, at certain points, adds further nuances to the conclusions drawn from GDP trends.