Author: Márton Czirfusz
Uneven development and the post-crisis Hungarian workfare state
The aftermath of the 2008 crisis led to a changing national policy landscape in Hungary, towards a distinct form of a workfare state. This policy changes of recent years included a severe cut of unemployment benefits and of certain welfare provisions for the unemployed, as well as an introduction of a massive public works programme financed by the national state (with a share of more than 4% within all employment).
Existing empirical research about the topic has covered the changing political economy of the national-level labour policy, e.g. by arguing that the changing policy environment of employment (including a flexibilisation for the needs of transnational companies) and that of unemployment are two sides of the same coin. Register-based empirical research has dealt with the individual level, and has shown how people are stuck in repeating episodes of public works employment, unemployment / social benefits and periods of non-work; without any chance of a long-term employment in the primary labour market. Less attention was paid, however, to how this change also solidified patterns of uneven geographical development at the local level. This paper contributes to this question.
This research is based on official local-level data on public works employment, on recipients of different social benefits for unemployed people and on the number of registered unemployed without any social assistance, covering the years from 2011 to 2014. The main aim is to show how the roll-out of the workfare state meant a shift from unemployment benefits to both the participation in the public works programme and to a growth of unemployed people without any social assistance. The emphasis will be put on how certain localities and regions of the country have been marginalised because of this policy change, with less and less room for manoeuvre by the local state and by individuals because of these structural constraints.
Theoretically, the paper contributes to a better understanding of how segmentation of the labour market proceeds in a non-core country context, following policy changes reacting to the global economic crisis. It goes beyond state-of-the-art empirical literature in Hungary by arguing that such national policies have severe impacts, because they strengthen the division between deserving and undeserving unemployed, as well as between employed and unemployed people, both socially and spatially. Contributing also to the geographical political economy literature, the paper pays attention to the reproduction of uneven development, by analysing spaces and places which are embedded in global divisions of labour, although not through traditional wage work, but through changing conditions of transfers.