Sorozatok

Poverty has various definitions and, accordingly, several indicators that serve to operationalize those definitions (see e.g. Boarini and d’Ercole, 2006).1 For example, as defined by the European Union, the poor are ‘individuals whose resources are so limited as to exclude them from the minimal acceptable way of life of the Member State in which they live’ (European Council, 1975: 36). The EU’s poverty definition thus contains both outcome (exclusion from the minimal acceptable way of life) and resource (lack of resources) elements (Fusco et al., 2010). In order to monitor the poverty reduction target, the EU2020 Strategy identified a composite indicator. Based on that, people living in poverty or social exclusion are defined as those who are poor in terms of relative income, are materially deprived, or who live in households with low work intensity. In the poverty and social exclusion indicator of the EU2020 Strategy, income poverty is related to the ‘resource’ element and material deprivation to the ‘outcome’ element of the definition. 2 TÁRKI Social Research Institute has been regularly publishing reports on the trends in poverty in Hungary for more than 25 years, using a set of indicators that has been widely accepted and used in international comparative analyses. Initially, this data source was the Hungarian Household Panel (e.g. Spéder, 1998); since 2001, it has been the TÁRKI Household Monitor Survey (Gábos and Szivós, 2010; Gábos et al., 2013; 2015). In the second half of the 2000s, due to the monitoring processes arising from Hungary’s EU membership, the publications came to include indicators of other poverty approaches (e.g. material deprivation, low work intensity), as well as relative income poverty measures. Also, in order to provide an international context, the publication was supplemented with data from the EU-SILC (European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) survey coordinated by Eurostat. The present study aims at continuing this tradition, this time relying entirely on calculations based on the EU-SILC database. It includes annual cross-sectional indicators of poverty and social exclusion; these snapshots are supplemented by another chapter in the volume (Branyiczki and Gábos) that studies the dynamics of poverty.

The Hungarian Social Report 2019 forms part of the long-standing tradition of social reporting in Europe. As Noll and Berger (2014: 9) emphasize, social reports and social monitoring activities are aimed at ‘regular monitoring and analysis of as well as reporting on the living conditions and well-being of the population and their changes over time’. By generating quantitative information and empirically based analytical knowledge on well-being and progress in a society (or group of societies), social reporting can contribute to better-informed evidence-based policy making. While social monitoring is about the periodic production of carefully developed indicators and indicator systems, social reporting goes beyond this to incorporate analysis, interpretation and evaluation of trends (Noll, 2004: 163). The Hungarian Social Report first appeared in 1990 (Andorka et al., 1990a; 1990b). Its aim was to join the already existing reporting traditions of France, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom (to mention just a few of the most prominent reporting countries). Rudolf Andorka, Tamás Kolosi and György Vukovich, the editors of the first edition, set the series goal of painting as complete a picture as possible of Hungarian society. Theirs was the first social report published in a post-socialist Eastern European country. Since then, a Social Report has been published every two years by TÁRKI Social Research Institute (for the most recent one, see Kolosi and Tóth, 2018) – and with this frequency it is certainly among the leaders on the international social reporting scene. The Hungarian Social Report series is envisaged as a collection of analytical chapters covering several domains, such as social structure, mobility, elements of well-being, values and attitudes, and addressing specific issues and problems in particular years. As such, it belongs to a tradition that also provides evaluation and interpretation of social trends: it aims to go beyond data, to offer better information for political decision making on the one hand, and on the other to provide the general reader with a better idea of social trends. As has been mentioned, a Hungarian edition has appeared every two years since 1990. But an English edition is published much less frequently: in 1990, 1998 and 2004 (see Kolosi et al., 2004).

In the June 2018 issue of The Atlantic, Matthew Stewart published an article entitled ‘The birth of a new American aristocracy’ and carrying the subtitle: ‘The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy. The class divide is already toxic and is fast becoming unbridgeable.’ Well, The Atlantic is not a major social science journal (certainly not in the same league as the American Journal of Sociology or the American Sociological Review), so perhaps there is no need to pay it much attention… Nevertheless, there is some serious academic writing on the subject, especially by Richard Reeves and Robert Putnam (and some mainstream sociologists/demographers whom we cite later in this chapter), who also express concern over greater social closure (or less ‘fluidity’) at the top of US society; and so the question of a ‘New Aristocracy’ – at least in the US – may deserve some consideration. At the same time, mobility studies report on a decrease in social fluidity in the post-transition countries, which to some extent runs counter to previous expectations about rising meritocracy following the collapse of socialist regimes (including Kolosi et al., 2003; Breen and Luijkx, 2004; Jackson and Evans, 2017). In what follows, we first look at the findings and predictions of the US literature of social closure at the top. Then we review how Hungary fares in international comparison with regard to social mobility developments, especially at certain points in the vertical hierarchy. Then we attempt to identify social processes that point to closure at the broadly understood top of society (the highest quartile or so). While it is impossible to pinpoint the ‘exact’ place of the cleavage border, we argue that it is certainly well below the often targeted ‘top 1 per cent’.

This study presents the changes in the housing sector since 2000 in four steps. First, we evaluate the Hungarian housing situation in an international comparative context, looking for the connection between economic development and the housing consumption level of households. Then we divide the years after 2000 into three periods, in order to analyse macro-level developments related to the housing system (construction, house prices, transactions and so forth). Next, we separately examine developments in the housing situation of different social strata over the past 15 years. And finally, we take a look at recent housing market trends, which show signs of a post-crisis recovery, but at the same time indicate the re-emergence of pre-crisis problems.

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.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate public opinion on migration generally, and more specifically attitudes toward asylum seekers during the migration crisis affecting Europe. The time frame of our analysis is 2014 to 2018, as we analyse the public attitudes of Hungarian and European citizens before, during and after the peak of the migration crisis. The structure is as follows: first, international longitudinal data will be presented, drawing on European comparative surveys during 2014–18; secondly, we focus our attention on the so-called Visegrád countries and the joint research that took place in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary (the V4 countries) between August and October 2015. Thirdly, we zoom in on the Hungarian data related to asylum seekers arriving from different source countries and analyse the social basis of the migration-related question. Finally, we summarize our results.

In Hungary, the financial and economic crisis (and its aftermath) upset the stagnating or slightly improving poverty trends of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Both inequality and relative income poverty rates1 increased during the period from 2007 to 2012/13 (from 12.6 per cent to 17 per cent between 2007 and 2012, based on TÁRKI data, and from 12.3 per cent to 15 per cent between 2007 and 2013, according to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office – HCSO). Moreover, the increase in the severe material deprivation rate2 (which is strongly correlated with real income) was especially dramatic (TÁRKI: from 34 per cent to 37 per cent between 2009 and 2012; HCSO: from 18 per cent to 28 per cent between 2007 and 2013). Then both indicators decreased significantly after the crisis: the former from 15 per cent to 13.4 per cent, and the latter from 28 per cent to 16 per cent, according to the HCSO (HCSO, 2017; Szivós and Tóth, 2012). Aside from the crisis, social policy interventions that shifted with the political wind also affected poverty trends (Gábos and Tóth, 2017). Analysis of the cross-sectional TÁRKI Household Monitor surveys indicates that some of the tendencies visible in the post-transition period increased during the financial and economic crisis (2009–12); thus social segregation and the intergenerational transmission of poverty have been on the rise (Gábos et al., 2012). The drop in the severe material deprivation rate between 2012 and 2014 was mostly thanks to groups at low risk of poverty leaving deprivation status (Gábos et al., 2015: 57). Our aim is to check whether or not these conclusions based on cross-sectional survey data are also supported by panel data. First, we look at how data from the longitudinal survey can supplement the snapshots of cross-sectional data. For example, it is important for social policy making to see whether most of the people living in poverty in a given year are persistently or only temporarily poor, and to identify which social groups are more likely to enter or exit poverty. In Hungary, 13.8 per cent of the population were income poor in 2011 and 64 per cent were persistently income poor.3 Both values are around the EU average. Similarly, the proportion of people who exited poverty during 2008–12 was close to the EU aver-age: approximately 35 per cent of the people at risk of poverty in the preceding year. Meanwhile, the share of people entering poverty was 5.5 per cent on average during this period – below the EU average (Vaalavuo, 2015). How-ever, basing its conclusions on earlier data (from 2006–09), the European Commission has categorized Hungary as a country with a high risk of entering poverty and a low risk of exiting it, and with a relatively high persistent at-risk-of-poverty rate (EC, 2013). We analyse the longitudinal database of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), coordinated by Eurostat. First, we briefly describe the database and our methodology (section 2); then we show the trends of persistent poverty and persistent severe material deprivation in the EU (section 3). In section 4, we turn to Hungary and compare the sociodemographic characteristics of those groups that entered poverty and severe material deprivation between 2009 and 2012 with those groups that exited poverty and deprivation between 2011 and 2014. We also report multivariate statistics on the correlation between these socio-demographic characteristics and the measures of poverty (section 5). Finally, in section 6, we summarize our findings.

Most studies on trust, and especially trust in institutions, express concern about the declining (or at best stagnating) trends of public confidence in government, the EU and other institutions (such as the law, the courts or the police). Recent decades have been characterized by observers as a period of ‘crisis of trust’ in European societies (see e.g. Hosking, 2017). The erosion of trust is worrisome because it may signal legitimacy problems and a declining willingness on the part of citizens to cooperate with state institutions. This may bring about a radicalization of politics or a weakening of law-abiding attitudes (Boda, 2013). The economic crisis of 2007–09 had a clear and negative effect on trust; and since confidence in the EU has been particularly affected, the supporters of the European project have expressed some fear concerning the future of the European Union. Our chapter analyses the trends of institutional trust in Europe using data from the Eurobarometer (European Commission, 2007–16) and the European Quality of Life Survey (Eurofound, 2018b). We build on our research done for Eurofound (Eurofound, 2018a), but this paper focuses more on Hungary. One of our conclusions is that in the past few years trust in institutions has been slowly increasing in the countries of the EU. This offers a glimmer of hope, because it suggests that the crisis of trust is not irreversible.

Az elmúlt évtizedben azonban a társadalomtudományokban egyre nagyobb figyelmet fordítanak a vagyoneloszlásra. A rugalmas munkaerőpiacok, a gyengülő jóléti államok és a gazdasági válságok idején egyre inkább felértékelődik a vagyon szerepe. Ebben a tanulmányban az anyagi transzferek (öröklés, ajándékozás) szerepét elemeztük a magyarországi vagyongyarapodásban európai összehasonlításban csaknem három évtizeddel a piacgazdasági átmenet után, az Európai Központi Bank 2017-es Household Finances and Consumption Survey felmérésének adatai alapján. Eredményeink szerint az örökség és a kapott ajándék hét százalékponttal növeli a felső vagyoni kvintilisbe kerülés esélyét Magyarországon (ceteris paribus), ami a leggyengébb hatás az elemzésbe bevont EU-országok közül. Összességében az eredmények arra utalnak, hogy a vagyonátruházások hozzájárulnak a magyarországi vagyonteremtéshez, de a hatás más európai országokban tapasztaltnál gyengébb. Úgy tűnik, hogy még három évtizeddel a piacgazdaságra való áttérés után sem a generációk közötti vagyonátadás a háztartások vagyonfelhalmozását elősegítő fő csatorna. Ennek oka az lehet, hogy mivel a vagyonfelhalmozás a posztszocialista országokban csak körülbelül egy generációval ezelőtt kezdődött, a vagyontranszferek hatása még kevésbé látható.

Health status can be viewed as a complex ‘outcome indicator’ of a country’s socio-economic and political processes (Sen, 1995) because a long and healthy life is in itself a valued outcome for individuals. It is also one of the key components of well-being at both the societal and the individual level that are fundamentally influenced by government policies. Furthermore, the right to health is one of the fundamental dimensions of human dignity, hu-man rights and the fulfilment of democratic norms. Currently, the growth in health inequalities poses a serious threat to the economic performance and long-term social progress of Hungary. Alleviation of these inequalities is of fundamental importance to Hungarian society (Orosz and Kollányi, 2014). Health inequalities have received increasing attention in the international arena since the early 2000s, following a long period of ‘being forgotten’ (Marmot and Wilkinson, 2000). The greater attention to health inequalities is part of a broader paradigm shift. Research – as well as increasing social and political tension – has highlighted the fact that social polarization, disintegration and the upsurge in political extremism represent threats not only to individual well-being, security and life satisfaction, but also to long-term eco-nomic development (OECD, 2011). Demographic change – and the declining share of the active population – has drawn attention to the human factors of economic growth. This has brought about a new approach in the European Commission’s health policy: governments have been encouraged to consider good health and health care as a key factor contributing to a quantitative and qualitative improvement in labour supply, as well as to long-term eco-nomic growth (European Commission, 2007). However, the economic crisis that broke in 2008 did have a number of negative effects on health and health care: on the one hand, it aggravated the social risks associated with health inequalities; on the other, it further reduced the availability of re-sources to tackle those inequalities (WHO, 2013). Public spending on health fell in real terms in a number of countries – including Hungary – in the early 2010s (Quaglio et al., 2013). Different aspects of the inequalities in health and health care have been addressed by social research in Hungary since the early 1980s, and thus a substantial body of knowledge has accumulated over recent decades (see, for example, Hablicsek, 2007; Józan 1994; Kovács 2007; 2012; Kopp and Szedmák, 1998; Losonczi, 1989; Orosz, 1990). Nevertheless, considering their importance, health inequalities have thus far received limited attention among the political elite and the public.