11th SVOC International Conference
On November 21, 2025, the Institute of World Economics at the Research Centre for Economics and Regional Studies held its eleventh prestigious international conference, entitled “The Role of the State in Variants of Capitalism – East-Central European perspectives in the era of new geopolitical, geoeconomic rivalries.” This year, the event was organized on a smaller scale, as an invitation-only professional workshop. The leading experts on the topic participated in person and discussed the economic opportunities and strategies of Central and Eastern European countries considering the latest global economic trends in a series of panel discussions.
The plenary lecture initiating the debate was given by László Csaba (PhD, Central European University and professor at Corvinus University of Budapest). In his lecture, he analysed the various driving forces and aspects of the new global disorder. After clarifying the concepts, he first highlighted the main milestones leading to chaos, then examined the role of the main actors and its transformation. Finally, he summarized the main conclusions regarding the global world order (disorder). The very dynamic, exciting and richly illustrated presentation was followed by numerous comments and an exciting discussion, in which the participants drew the speaker’s attention primarily to the security dimension (specifically the development of the defense industry) and the increase in debt.
The panel presentations covered three main topics. The first focused on the crises of capitalism and issues of economic growth sustainability. The second panel analysed regional responses to European development paths, while the third panel discussion examined the opportunities for small Central and Eastern European countries from the perspective of various actors. Half of the speakers were Hungarian researchers and half were foreign researchers, so the presentations provided a good overview of the latest developments and challenges in our region, as well as the differences and similarities. We plan to publish the materials from these extremely high-quality presentations in an edited volume and a special issue of a journal, if possible.
The event was hosted by HTK (Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4.).
The program is available here.
Next year’s SVOC conference will explore the latest industrial policy perspectives and challenges and, unusually, will be held in June 2026. We are pleased to announce that Réka Juhász (University of British Columbia), one of the leading representatives and active shapers of today’s industrial policy discourse in international academic literature, has accepted our invitation to give the keynote plenary lecture.
