How we work

Every analysis rests on a framework, declared or not. Most government budget documents embed their assumptions without naming them. We prefer to name ours: we analyse Hungary's budget through the classical liberal tradition — the Austrian economics of Mises and Hayek, the public-choice analysis of Buchanan and Tullock, the ordoliberal rule-of-law thinking of Röpke and Eucken, and the institutional economics of North and Coase.

These traditions differ in method and register, but they converge on a common set of working premises. Prices coordinate information that no central planner can possess. Politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives. Long-run prosperity depends on institutional quality more than on any single policy variable. Concentrated benefits with dispersed costs produce persistent rent-seeking. Intervention tends to generate unintended consequences that compound over time. We treat these as well-supported working premises, not as dogma. We publish our reasoning so it can be tested.

This does not make our analysis partisan. We apply the framework consistently, regardless of which government proposed a given expenditure or which constituency benefits from it. The framework is the lens; the data is the object; the analysis follows from both — and is open to correction wherever either the lens or the data proves wrong.

Democratic societies balance two things: what is true, and what is politically feasible. Economic reforms that would produce large long-term gains often impose concentrated short-term costs on identifiable groups. The incentive structure of democratic politics systematically underweights diffuse future benefits and overweights immediate visible costs.

We are fully aware of this tension. We do not pretend that a rigorous budget analysis will, on its own, transform policy. What we believe is something narrower: that the boundaries of public debate shift through the persistent accumulation of understanding — through data, explanation and open argument. What is unthinkable today becomes thinkable tomorrow, and eventually inevitable.

Our renewal programme is an explicit attempt to address this: for each major class of expenditure, we give an honest account of both the short-term disruption and the long-term benefit. We do not minimise hardship. We try to explain why we believe the trajectory leads somewhere better. The demographic briefs that walk this through stakeholder by stakeholder are being regenerated against the current renewal programme and will be published in the coming weeks.