Enterprise and Entrepreneurship [antikvár]

The term socialist entrepreneurship has been in use in Hungary for a good ten years now. It was coined by Tibor Liska, an economist some consider as their guru and others an economic maverick. By the mid-eighties it had become a key word in articles on the economy and in political speeches. Yet, ten years ago, different winds were blowing: the country was witnessing the strengthening of industrial ministries, and in the economic monthly Kö^ga^dasdgi S^emle, the debate on the connections between plan and market was carried out only at a theoret-ical level. Nobody was making preparations for the day of reckoning about to come and the national economic plan drawn up in 1976 still assumed the maintenance of the prevailinggrowthrate of the national economy for the next five years. Tbe 1968 beginnines Enterprise as the method of tackling economic difficulties as an attitude, a men-tality, began to gain ground only much later, around 1980. By then it was obvious that the Hungarian economy could not be isolated from the effects of the 1973 energy crisis, that the complacency of the immediate past, when the country refused to take note of the change in external conditions, had to be paid for, and with interests. Thewords enterprise and entrepreneurial behaviour began to be used by economic theorists, who had looked to the strengthening of the autonomy of enterprises, and a greater role of the market even in the mid-sixties. They began to study the ten years since the introduction of the new system of economic control in 1968. It had been designed to liberate latent energies and the spirit of enterprise, but the conclusions they published were dispiriting: so many brakes had been built into the system that few of the original objectives had survived. While it seemed that the central measures regulated only matters of détail, wage increases given to industrial workers which were not backed by performance, the création of giant firms and the imperceptible shift of authority for de-cision-making towards central control (for instance in respect of investments), or the neglect of income-producing aspects when granting crédits ail fragmented and made nonsensical the ventures of originally en-thusiastic executives. Some economists went further and argued that the economic reform introduced in 1968 was not whole-hearted : "Even the very issue of whether the new economic system should be based on indirect control or operate as part of the self-regulat-ing market was left open." László Antal, a leading Hungarian economist, pointed this out in his book Gazdasigirinyltisi is p/n^ugyi rendszprünk a reform útján (The Economic