Large oil field, steel production capacity, or number of tractors produced do not make the company rich. The company grows rich thanks to skilled people in the right place, their excellent skills and ability to adapt to change. As Julian Simon used to say, the ultimate source of wealth is man.
The Slovak Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) has just released its new study titled Next Generation EU: Why We Should Be Concerned about the Recovery Plan.
The next five years will be crucial. Public finances should come out of huge deficits, and the lesson from the previous crisis is clear. Tax increases will never be temporary. Pulling the tax brake can serve as an additional “austerity” argument in the discussion on lowering the deficit.
When we talk about wages in Slovakia, we refer to gross wage. From an economic point of view, however, it is a fictitious value created by accountants. It represents an arbitrarily set point between the two key values: net wage and labor costs.
The Slovak agricultural sector suffers from several problems that hinder the competitiveness of farmers: complicated land ownership, due to which (young) farmers cannot access fields, an unpredictable business environment and bureaucracy and, last but not least, lack of investment in capital equipment.
The Slovak education system has a number of problems but the generally low teacher salary is not one of them. Those who claim the opposite refer to an international comparison: the share of teachers’ wages in wages of university-educated people.
How well would an average politician, clerk or analyst at a ministry perform as an investor? Recently, we have had several opportunities to witness it ourselves. In some public projects, the low return on investment is evident even to a random passer-by.
Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) introduced the Bureaucracy Index in Slovakia in 2016 aiming to draw the attention to the amount of red tape a small entrepreneur has to comply with on a daily basis.
After a successful first run in 2019, the INESS Institute published the 2020 international healthcare ranking Health for Money. The rankings follow 23 various indicators including life expectancy, maternal mortality, the consumption of antibiotics, among others.
Let’s look at the data – the results of this year’s Economics Olympiad organized by INESS, with over 6,500 high school students involved. We introduce 10 key findings concerning economic skills of the youth in Slovakia.
