How services are funded affects their effectiveness and quality. Take meals. It makes a big difference whether the state directly funds the operation of restaurants or “merely” mandates the issuance of food stamps, or whether restaurants are funded by paying customers. Each of these models brings different incentives and feedback loops.
The Green Deal is an initiative that has – and will have – a significant economic and redistributive impact unlike anything the European Union (EU) has seen before. Its implementation will require fundamental changes in the foundations of the European economy and trillions of euros of investment. But even that may not be enough. The Green Deal envisages the introduction of technological innovations that we have not yet discovered.
The pandemic period has not been kind to some patients’ relationship with health professionals. A period of information uncertainty, spawning hoaxes. The patient with his own opinion and his own information falls under a crooked gaze.
When people say “innovative improvement”, they immediately think of cars that don’t need to be driven; medicines that cure an incurable disease or vegetables that taste like meat. But an important innovation can also be a relatively unremarkable thing, such as shortening time. For example, to get from point A to point B, or to grow fruit from a plant, or the necessary hospital stay after a surgery.
The current social package worth more than a billion euro has definitively confirmed that Slovak government is going kamikaze in the area of public finances. After all, the money is “lying on the pavement” (even though we already have the highest corporate tax rate in all of Eastern Europe), so what’s the problem? Even before the package, Slovakia already had the worst long-term sustainability of public finances in the EU.
In Slovakia, we have a problem with the drain of the brightest young people to foreign universities. If we want to solve this problem, we need to know the causes. And we can only know these if we understand how higher education works and what its real added value is.
