Minister of State for Economic Strategy Zoltán Cséfalvay emphasised the crucial role which knowledge capital plays within the national economy at the Figyelő TOP 200 conference in Budapest.

As he said, products of high added value constitute 17 percent of Hungarian exports, the country is among the top ten high-tech exporters of the world and it is the seventh on the ranking for creative product exporters.
Knowledge-intensive industrial sectors compose 45 percent to Hungary’s GDP, compared to the EU average of 39 percent, and with this performance the country is the third best after Ireland and Germany, the Minister of State said.

Zoltán Cséfalvay stressed that Hungary spent 1.3 percent of GDP on research and development last year. This proportion, he added, has been constantly increasing since 2010 and last year’s figure was the highest over the past two decades.

The importance of knowledge capital is also demonstrated by the fact that venture capital investment projects have been rising in Hungary and Budapest is evolving into a start-up centre, he said. The Minister of State pointed out that the key objective of the Budapest HUB working group, a team of start-up experts, is to turn Budapest into Central and Eastern Europe’s start-up hub by the end of the decade, for which Hungary has a good chance.

In view of the Minister of State, the movement of labour force is a regional phenomenon which in case of Hungary is a two-way process: it is both inbound and outbound. On the basis of German statistics he said that 54 thousand Hungarian jobseekers went to Germany in 2012, while 28 thousand people returned.

The Minister of State drew attention to the fact that the Government has introduced various measures designed to retain and draw back knowledge capital, for example the Lendület (Impetus) Programme, the Ifjúsági Garancia Program (Youth Guarantee Programme) or the Vállalkozz Itthon Program (Be a Hungarian Entrepreneur Programme). 760 thousand people benefited from the Job Protection Action Plan, he added.

In the 2014-2020 EU development period Hungary will allocate HUF 709bn for research, development and innovation, Zoltán Cséfalvay said. As he stressed, as of 1 January 2014 professional strategic planning, management and executive tasks will be concentrated within the executive body of the Economic Development and Innovation Operative Programme, and the Innovation Fund will also belong under the sphere of competence of Hungary’s Ministry for National Economy.

(Ministry for National Economy)