Five studies on one subject
LÁSZLÓ CSABA, GYÖRGY CSÁKI, DÁNIEL DEÁK, ZOLTÁN GÁLIK AND SZÁZADVÉG-TRIO
(DIÁNA HORVÁTH – DÁNIEL MOLNÁR – GÁBOR REGŐS)
What would Hungary loose if her EU-membership would have been ceased?
That is the question we presented to five excellent Academic researchers. All of them are experts on EU-issues, British and Hungarian economics. We asked them to analyse what would have been the outcome of an imaginary Huxit.
The question has been justified by more aspects. First, the Brexit process made a lot of confusion in the frame of mind of more Hungarians, even those who try to follow it closely. Second, in the everyday conversations increasingly appears the sentiment that the Hungarian government would slowly navigate Hungary out of the EU, or „Brussels” would be bust of the maverick Hungarian policy and sooner or later bounces the country from it. Although we wouldn’t exaggerate the importance of either opinion, we considered them as Frequently Asked Questions and tried to answer them correctly.
We asked our authors to consider the subject as a sci-fi. We didn’t ask them to lament what are the reasons of the Huxit and did not require to focus only on economics but offered them a free interpretation.
We succeeded in raising their interest. And we hope our readers would really enjoy our uncommon scientific adventure…
Sovereign debt crisis management in the EU. Sequencing, unintended consequences, lock-in
ISTVÁN BENCZES
By prohibiting the provision of financial assistance to sovereigns paid by other member states or the union itself, the so-called no-bail-out clause proved to be one of the main pillars of the architecture of the European Economic and Monetary Union for a long time. Parties seemed to behave accordingly in the early phase of the sovereign debt crisis. Later on, however, with the explicit aim of avoiding the disorderly default of member states (and especially of Greece) and/or the falling apart of the euro zone, member countries agreed on not just disregarding the no-bail-out clause but also on the institutionalization of sovereigns’ bail-outs by establishing the European Stability Mechanism. This process, however, proved to be highly contradictory. By scrutinizing the first round of the Greek bail out process in 2010 and the creation of the stability mechanism in 2012, the article highlights the importance of sequencing along with the unintended consequences of member states’ decisions, reflecting upon acute problems. Surprisingly, all related intergovernmental decisions have not weakened, but, in fact, have strengthened economic integration, and have largely determined the path of future development.
Introducing market based balancing on the EU gas markets
PÁLMA SZOLNOKI
The article focuses on the estimation of the effectiveness of BAL NC, the EU wide regulation on natural gas balancing operations, adopted in 2014. BAL NC actually could be considered as a second phase market opening in the natural gas markets. An essential element of BAL NC is that the primary responsibility for balancing should lie with the traders and only residual role should remain at the system operator. Thus within-day processes are being placed under market coordination instead of the coordination within one company, the system operator. In the article I develop indicators that can be used to examine traders’ participation in balancing. I present the indicators and use empirical data (on the Hungarian and Polish gas markets) to illustrate their functioning. The developed indicators, as the Hungarian and Polish examples show, reveal how successful was the involvement of traders in balancing. Longer time series also show the development process: by now in the Hungarian and Polish markets a very significant part of balancing (70–90%) is carried out by the traders.