CEU Business School: Value Creating Government in the Post-Crisis Eastern Europe

Value Creating Government in Post-Crisis Eastern Europe:
Challenge or Opportunity?

CEU Business School in Budapest hosted an Exclusive Discussion Forum today on the governing challenges in the Eastern European countries in the post-crisis times. Besides the Lecture Series of George Soros, at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences during the week, this event focused on the interactions between the private and public sectors and aimed at initiating a regional discourse on how to evaluate governmental activities and how governments could be creating more value to societies. Senior political, business and entrepreneurial leaders from the region, including Waldemar Pawlak, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Poland, Peter Makszin, State Secretary in the Prime Ministers Office in Hungary, Robert Esik, CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks Hungary and Mateusz Zaremba, Executive Director of The Creative Factory in Russia expressed their views and participated in the discussion. CEU Business School graduate students had also been invited to the Forum.

The current global financial crisis seemed to settle the dispute whether problems concerning business‐government interactions can be resolved by simply limiting such interactions to a bare minimum. The global economy was confronted with a systemic threat imposed by numerous underregulated segments characterizing the financial industry. It is clear that in the post-crisis world, governments will have to take a more active role in correcting prevalent market failures and addressing growing social disparities in order to help prevent such crises in the future. For Central and Eastern Europe, including countries known as the EU East, this lesson comes as a somewhat awkward surprise. During the past two decades following the fall of communism, prominent voices in the region have been advocating a far-reaching restraint in regulating newly created market economies. Calls for a more visible governmental role have been mostly associated with populists of various sorts ranging from labor unionists to radical political entrepreneurs.

During the discussion Marek Kloczko, secretary General of Polish Chamber of Commerce expressed that the Government, at least in Poland, issues thousands of pages of regulations in a year, yet it seems that there is no converstion between the public and the provate sectors. A more substential dialogue is needed, which results in actions to improve societies in which governments operate in. „Governmental activities are unfortunately a like a black box to most people said Peter Maxin, Hungarian State Secretary, this initiative and dialogue should also aim at making the givernmental activities more transparent and clear, because there are many good initiatives for regulations as well.

What is inherently missing in our region is what a leading contemporary progressive intellectual, Harvard Professor Roberto Unger calls institutional imagination: willingness to listen to concrete needs of local societies and markets, and to address them systematically through an ingenious institutional design. CEU Business Schools Initiative for Regulatory Innovation is established precisely to fulfill this objective. The new initiative is not a substitute but rather a complement to numerous existing projects aimed at identifying best practices and sharing experiences between post-transition countries, emerging markets and Western economies.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• ceu business school
• Value creating government
• Waldemar Pawlak
• Peter Maxin
• Maciej Kisilowski