The results of the latest quarterly business climate survey reveal considerably more favourable economic condition compared to the previous quarter: the IEER Quarterly Business Climate Index increased from 24 to 32 points, which is the highest value in the history of the indicator. It was only 19 points in the same period of the previous year. The Uncertainty Index is at a current level of 37 points, which is slightly lower than in the previous quarter (it was 38 points in October 2015). The value of the Uncertainty Index indicates that the current trend is not uniform within the private sector, and that it will continue to be confined to one part of the economy and will not be felt by all companies.

In the course of its latest business climate survey HCCI Institute for Economic and Enterprise Research (IEER) examined potential changes in wages in the year 2016. According to our estimation enterprises plan raising gross salaries by 3.0-3.2%. This is an average wage growth, which slightly exceeds last year’s increase.

In the autumn of 2015 IEER conducted a survey for its short-term labor market research, and within this framework we asked the companies contacted on issues related to public workers. Most companies have not been in contact with public works labourers or public works programs. Most of those that have, evaluated the impact on their business situation negatively. More claim that they would employ former public workers than those who actually did in 2015, which may indicate an improper functioning of the labor market.

The latest survey for the annual “Short-term labor market forecast” research project of the Ministry of National Economics and HCCI Institute for Economic and Enterprise Research (IEER) took place in September-October 2015. During the survey county government offices and IEER staff interviewed 7,112 company managers about their current and expected need for labor. The results can be considered representative by the companies’ geographical location and economic sector, and within this by employee numbers. In the following the results of this research are presented compared to other relevant data sources and estimates.

Children are more exposed to the effects of poverty than adults, therefore it is important to treat child poverty as a distinct topic from poverty in general. Furthermore, child poverty and adult poverty have different causes and effects, for example the consequences of child poverty usually persist in adulthood. For this reason, it is important to elaborate particular approaches and methods to understand and measure child poverty as well as its causes and effects. So far there is no agreement among researchers on the definition of child poverty and hence there are various measurement methods. In our paper we shortly introduce five types of child poverty approaches and their proposed methodology to measure it.

The newest values of HCCI IEER’s District Development Index (DDI) give us a new picture this year about development differences in the 174 districts of Hungary and highlight what changes have occurred in the course of the last two years.

The data shows that the most developed district outside of Budapest and its agglomeration can be found almost exclusively in Western and Central Transdanubia (Győr, Mosonmagyaróvár, Tata, Veszprém) and beside these only the districts of Szeged and Eger made it to the most developed top 20. The least developed districts are mostly in Northern Hungary and in the Northern Great Plains. Some of the districts in Transdanubia are also among the least developed (Tab, Barcs, Sárbogárd, Devecser) which indicates that among the regions of Hungary Transdanubia has the biggest internal disparities.

In the autumn of 2015 the most recent survey of the Short-Term Labour Market Forecast was conducted by the Ministry of National Economy and the IEER. In the research 7,112 company managers were interviewed about their current and expected demand for labour. The following brief summary shows the change in the proportion of companies experiencing recruitment difficulties and the changes in various types of labour recruitment difficulties. Finally, we also present how the recruitment difficulties vary in different company groups.

The study examines the employment status (i) and wages (ii) of young humanities and arts graduates compared to other graduates in Hungary using the 2013 data of the Hungarian Graduate Career Tracking System. The dataset has several limitations regarding reliability and validity, which we attempted to correct to improve the quality of our estimations. The results requires further research. We find that amongst males the conditional overall employment differences for humanities and arts graduates without a degree requirement are not statistically significant. As for jobs requiring tertiary education and salaries disadvantage is present only compared to engineering, information technology and economics or business graduates. Amongst females we find that the conditional employment differences vary greatly by the definition of degree requirement, so our results are unequivocal. However salary disadvantage is statistically significant compared to engineering, information technology and economics or business graduates. Our results suggest that in Hungary young graduates with these three degrees have more advantageous labor market outcomes than others, but the situation of humanities and arts graduates does not differ greatly from the rest of the disciplines.

In our following brief analysis we examine for what purposes domestic enterprises generally use the internet. Our analysis is based on data from the business climate survey conducted by the Institute for Economic and Enterprise Research (IEER) in October 2015.

The data show that the highest proportion of firms surveyed use the internet for administration (e.g. the Hungarian version of an electronic civil service portal called “Ugyfelkapu” or “Client Gateway”), email correspondence with customers, and to follow market trends. Just over half of the analyzed companies have their own website, which is explained by the large number of micro businesses employing fewer than 10 people. The computer systems themselves along with the security of the stored information and the modern state of the technology were all regarded to be very important by the companies.

The results of the latest IEER SME Outlook business climate survey reveal more favourable economic conditions compared to the previous quarter: the Business Climate Index increased from 16 to 20 points. This value is far higher than the one in October 2014 (10 points). The Uncertainty Index is at a current level of 38 points, which is higher than in the previous quarter (it was 35 points in July 2015), and the same as the value measured in the preceding quarter. The value of the Uncertainty Index indicates that the current trend is not uniform within the private sector, and that it will continue to be confined to one part of the economy and will not be felt by all small and medium sized companies.