INESS

On April 17, 2024, INESS organized a roundtable on the upcoming analysis of high infant mortality in Roma communities. After the presentation of the analysis prepared by Matej Bárta, the participants discussed various aspects of the issue. Our ongoing project, supported by the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, aims to support and improve policies to reduce extremely high infant mortality with the help of educational change.

Yes, this comment is about European regulations. It started with curved cucumbers and today not a day goes by that I do not send a few swear words in the direction of the Belgian capital over some minor but all the more annoying interference in my life. Somewhere high above, noble intentions such as privacy, space for competitors, or less waste are floating around, but at the end of the day, Kafkaesque bizarreness falls out of it.

We all want higher wages for less work. This explains why the four-day working week is such a popular topic in the media. But it is even less of a justification for the emotions that run high when the subject is discussed. These, in turn, prevent rational argumentation and consideration of all the problems with this popular proposal.

A new regulatory avalanche is rolling in on entrepreneurs. The Ministry of Labour is about to implement the EU Gender Pay Directive. This introduces new bureaucratic obligations for entrepreneurs. They will have to inform about the criteria they apply when setting wages in the company and define the pay procedure so that the employee knows what he or she has to do to get higher pay.

Recently, a Slovakian newspaper published a commentary about tighter regulation in the healthcare sector. The question remains what exactly does he mean by the word \"tighter regulation\"?

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said at Davos that Slovakia could become a country that will experiment with a four-day working week. It is a flattering topic and so several media immediately picked up on it.

Slovakia\'s new government has finally succumbed to the Sweet Tax Temptation, as we called it in our last publication. The Ministry of Finance has published a preliminary announcement describing its intention to introduce the tax. You read that right; it is not the Ministry of Health that is in charge of the health of the population and the sustainability of health spending.

Imagine you are running a business. You have a small business or a trade, and you are doing just enough to maintain the same standard of living across challenging times. Then suddenly, without any increase in your income compared to the prices around you, the state tells you that you are already earning enough to pay more in taxes.

A new movement called degrowth is being mentioned more and more often in the media around the world. The aim of this movement is to address current environmental challenges by abandoning the \'economic growth paradigm.\' However, life and humanity as we know it today exist only because of economic growth. We would not be dealing with the environment today without years, decades, and centuries of economic growth.

The need to consolidate public budgets is perhaps already evident, even to those political parties that have long perceived resources as limitless and freely available. Investors worldwide eagerly await opportunities to lend to debt-ridden Slovakia. Consolidation plans are beginning to emerge, the Financial Policy Institute at the Ministry of Finance has published the impact of austerity and tax measures on GDP.