The research, working with both qualitative and quantitative methods, focused on rural and agricultural areas. It aims to develop a mixed analysing model for the social enterprise’s complex employment effects, which can be extended later to assess the employment impacts of social enterprises in relevant segments and regions, such as in the field of social and health services.

According to the main results, profit-oriented and social enterprises are differentiated by their value system. While the economic functions are the most important factors in the value system of SMEs, the social enterprises concentrate on social functions and their employment focus has also bigger importance.  In the social economy, job creation is the primary objective, especially in case of employees who are in a difficult condition in the labour market. However, the lack of workforce also causes serious problems in these companies.

Social enterprises often lack entrepreneurial attitudes and skills. The creation of legal framework is inevitable for their development, as well as the elaboration of a national social enterprise developmental strategy that defines conceptual and supportive directions, frameworks, and shows predictable development paths for these businesses.

The study was presented by Luca Koltai, research leader (Chief Consultant of the Division for Public Policy and Impact Assessment of HÉTFA), and Gábor Balás, CEO of HÉTFA, at the conference entitled “Social economy: employment, entrepreneurship and innovation”, organized jointly by the Ministry of Human Capacities and World Bank.

The summary of presentation is available here.

Bálint Herczeg (2017): Cost-benefit analysis of high school graduation. ISSN 2062-378X

In case of programmes targeting human resource development, evaluation shall not only focus on direct results and short-term effects. However, estimation of long-term impacts is difficult in case of programmes such as early childhood interventions, since the real effects may occur after one generation. Let’s suppose that we can estimate the impact of the programme on the probability of high school graduation. By doing so we could get a method to estimate what changes these programmes induce in the life of the targeted children.

The aim of the paper is to present a model which is able to estimate the long-term effects of childhood development and educational programmes and compare the costs with the resulting budgetary benefits. The model is illustrated by Bálint Herczeg based on the example of the Hungarian Safe Start Children Programme.