Gender Equality National Report Hungary - European-microfinance ...

4. Conclusions and recommendations
4.1. Conclusions
Entrepreneurship culture practically needs to be recreated in Hungary; its quality needs to be
significantly improved and this requires a lot more effort. The main reason for this is that
during the Soviet occupation, traditional small private enterprises were not allowed to operate
for duration of about 40 years. The majority of businesses were established during and after
the transition years, however entrepreneurs lacked an entrepreneurial past and experience.
Entrepreneurs could not get the necessary knowledge from their parents, or in the school
system. Sadly, basic financial-entrepreneurial topics are still not included in the elementary
school curriculum, and even high schools and colleges/universities teach these mostly only
at business, finance and technology faculties.
The fact that the population of the country did not have notable entrepreneurial traditions,
experience or knowledge nor the necessary accumulated capital, significantly hindered the
development and efficient operation (or simply the survival) of the enterprises.
Even today the notable under-capitalization and lack of resources of micro- and small
enterprises remains a problem.
The existing entrepreneurial group in Hungary does not have a multi-generation
entrepreneurial past, which could have enabled capital accumulation.
The official SME development strategy approved by the government has been implemented
for some time now and it gets renewed from time to time (the latest such renewal was in
February 2007). However, it is usually accompanied by vivid professional debate because it
is not based on a wide professional consensus.
In their rhetoric, all governments so far have emphasized the support of the SME sector and
the improvement of financial terms; however it has not entirely been realized in practice or at
the required professional standards.
Sometimes there are some very innovative initiatives independent from government.
Frequently one gets the feeling that they fail to sufficiently appreciate the indirect ways of
supporting enterprises and the significance of the mediating and service providing institution.
The professional state apparatus responsible for enterprise promotion has not always taken
sufficient care of the SME promotion programs; it does not sufficiently appreciate the indirect
ways of enterprise promotion or the importance of the relaying service providing institutions.
Recently the government recognized that the administrative and financial burdens of starting,
running and ceasing a business have been high; thus a radical restructuring program has
been launched. This must be implemented consistently.
Although the institution of enterprise development was established a long time ago, it does
not seem to operate efficiently. The aim is now to improve the efficiency of the existing
institutions and to enhance the specialization and professionalism of the organizations.
The main task is to eliminate the shortcomings of the professional preparation, control and
finance of the programs as well as the parallelisms.
In order to promote micro-enterprises, a service providing network has been created on the
initiative and from the funds of the EU PHARE program, but the expertise and capacity of this
network were not sufficiently utilized by the governments. The results confirmed and signified
the necessity of the “bridging” relaying function of the LEAs though.
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