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Hungary Ownership
The means of production consist of all the material
factors
used to produce goods and include land, raw materials, and
capital. In a traditional centrally planned economy, the
state
owns all the significant means of production outside the
agricultural sector. The ruling party and the government
planning
bureaucracy exercise the functions of ownership and ration
the
means of production. In the agricultural sector, state,
cooperative, and private forms of ownership coexist, but
the
state closely supervises and controls all key aspects of
production.
In Hungary state ownership of the means of production
still
predominated in the late 1980s, although the government
had
broadened the scope of private and foreign ownership. The
state
has owned more than 90 percent of Hungary's agricultural
land
since its second collectivization campaign ended in the
early
1960s. In industry, economic reformers wanted the state to
delegate ownership functions to enterprises in the
socialist
sector or to independent holding companies whose only
function
would be to exercise ownership rights. (These companies
would
operate much the same way that incorporated companies in
capitalist economies operate.) Hungary had abolished the
system
of formal central allocation of resources for all but a
few
goods, and enterprises generally had to purchase labor,
raw
materials, and other inputs to production and sell output
on
their own. The government began allowing Hungarian
enterprises to
form joint ventures with foreign firms in 1972. Subsequent
laws
made joint ventures even more attractive for foreign
investors,
and in some instances foreign firms could take more than a
50
percent stake.
Data as of September 1989
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