Recurring Crises

This book looks back at the events with the benefit of hindsight. On the example of four years of struggle of the Hungarian government with the deepening crisis, it will show how different factors, those inherited from state socialism and those created during the transition, shaped the environment in which the transformation of enterprises took place. It is argued that this period was not a public finance, financial or industrial crisis, but a result of processes and factors that existed already in state socialism, only they were manifest in different phenomena. Today's problems in the public finance of Hungary show that these forces remain present. The analysis of the period of 1990-1994 shows that as long as the crisis is perceived as a crisis of public finance, it will recur as soon as the belt cannot be tightened any further and the government of the time believes that it can return to 'normality'.