Over the course of 2018, Corvinus University is hosting a series of events to honor internationally acclaimed economist János Kornai, who turns 90 on Sunday, January 21.
The series started off with a conference at the Budapest-based university on Thursday, where Professor Kornai gave a speech, alongside leading economists, who examined the impact of his ideas on the eurozone and his analyses comparing the economics of socialism and capitalism. He said:
I am Hungarian, so I am particularly interested in developments in this country. Unfortunately, I have to say, I’m very worried.”
András Lánczi, rector of Corvinus University, opened the conference and praised the lasting impact of Kornai’s works on successive generations of economists in his speech. László Lovász, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said Kornai’s book, Economics of Shortage (1980), had greatly influenced his contemporaries around the world, and he also noted Kornai’s leading positions at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and the London School of Economics.
The next event of the series will be a roundtable on February 20, focusing on the democratic transition in Central Europe. Additionally, in autumn, the university will hold an international conference and a seminar as well.
Kornai, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Harvard and Professor Emeritus at Corvinus, retired in 2002. He is recognized for his work as a theorist on both command and free-market economies, as well as for his research focusing on the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution and its aftermath, the comparative economics of socialism and capitalism, post-socialist transition, and the recent political and economic changes in Hungary. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Kornai is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europeae, and Foreign Member of the American, British, Bulgarian, Finnish, Russian, and Swedish Academies. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the International Economic Association.
He has received honorary doctorates from 15 universities and his works have been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2010, he was presented with Hungary’s highest state decoration, the Grand Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. Kornai’s latest book Látlelet: Tanulmányok a magyar állapotokról (Diagnosis: Studies on the Hungarian situation) was published in November 2017.
via MTI, kornai-janos.hu, economics.harvard.edu, mno.hu