Hungary

Being able to swim empowers individuals to make choices, have agency, and be free to choose core aspects of their life, such as working safely on or near water. It is also associated with lifelong health benefits and reduces the risk of drowning. Using data from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll 2019, this paper provides the first global estimates of adults’ ability to swim without assistance. Individuals in high-income countries are considerably more likely to report being able to swim without assistance than individuals in low-income countries. Disparities also exist within countries. In particular, women are less likely to be able to swim without assistance than men in virtually all countries, birth cohorts, and levels of education. Investing in reducing inequalities in life skills, such as swimming, can foster economic development and empowerment, especially in light of threats, such as climate change.

Understanding adults’ attitudes towards the environment is necessary to gauge the opportunities and challenges of creating effective and politically-feasible climate policies. Using data from the Wellcome Global Monitor 2020, the European Social Survey (Round 8), World Values Survey and EM-DAT, this paper examines how adults’ environmental attitudes vary within and across countries and details how environmental attitudes are associated with adults’ engagement in pro-environmental behaviours and support for environmentally-friendly policies. The paper explores whether the extent to which individuals prioritise the environment over the state of the economy or vice versa depends on individuals’ exposure to natural disasters or negative labour market conditions. Results indicate that people’s economic vulnerability and the sectors they work in impact their attitudes towards their environment and support for public policy. Furthermore, the findings suggest that increases in unemployment and exposure to natural disasters influence the extent to which individuals prioritise the environment.

The paper is the first in a series of two papers mapping young people’s environmental sustainability competence in EU and OECD countries that were prepared as background for the forthcoming OECD Skills Outlook 2023 publication. The papers are the results of a collaboration between the OECD Centre for Skills and the European Commission - Joint Research Centre (Unit B4) on students’ environmental sustainability competence. The second paper is titled: ‘The environmental sustainability competence toolbox: From leaving a better planet to our children to leaving better children for our planet’.

The paper is the second in a series of two papers mapping young people’s environmental sustainability competence in EU and OECD countries that were prepared as background for the forthcoming OECD Skills Outlook 2023 publication. The papers are the results of a collaboration between the OECD Centre for Skills and the European Commission - Joint Research Centre (Unit B4) on students’ environmental sustainability competence. The first paper is titled ‘Young people’s environmental sustainability competence: Emotional, cognitive, behavioural and attitudinal dimensions in EU and OECD countries.

This country note presents the results of an analysis of Hungary undertaken within the Labour Market Relevance and Outcomes of Higher Education Partnership Initiative project. The project was implemented by the OECD with the support of the European Commission with the aim of helping policy makers and higher education institutions enhance the employment outcomes of graduates by better aligning higher education provision with current and emerging labour market skill demands. Doctoral degree programmes in Hungary are now largely tailored toward careers in academia or public research organisations. However, employers in the private sector increasingly seek doctoral degree holders to increase firm-level innovation, and encourage doctoral education schools to equip graduates with transferable skills, which are of increasing importance in the changing labour market. The country note reviews the system context, highlights challenges faced by doctoral schools and lessons learned from current practice, and presents policy options.

Digital technologies have transformed the way people interact, work and learn. The emergency transition to online teaching and learning necessitated by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has posed a serious challenge to instructional routines of higher education systems across OECD countries. The pandemic has demonstrated the ability of higher education institutions to ensure continuity in teaching and learning, but it has also revealed that much work remains to be done to ensure digital technologies are effectively used to promote quality, efficiency and equity in higher education. This report, which focuses on the digital transformation of higher education in Hungary, is a collaboration between the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support (DG REFORM), the Hungarian Ministry for Innovation and Technology and the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills. Building on stakeholder engagement and comparative analysis, the report offers an assessment of the current state of digitalisation in higher education in Hungary, identifies policy recommendations to strengthen the current policy framework supporting digitalisation, and provides suggestions to help Hungarian authorities and stakeholders develop a monitoring framework and indicators to measure the digitalisation of the higher education system.

Countries need to urgently scale-up and upgrade their adult learning systems to help people adapt to the future world of work. Today, only two in five adults across the EU and OECD participate in education and training in any given year, according to the OECD Survey of Adults Skills. Participation is even lower among disadvantaged adults, such as those with low skill levels or in jobs at high risk of automation. For adult learning systems to be future-ready, governments must increase their efforts to engage more adults in continuous learning throughout their lives. While much has been written about the need for progress, it is less clear how adult learning participation can be increased in practice. Many good ideas struggle to translate into real change on the ground, as they get stuck in the reality of policy implementation. This report aims to understand the factors that make adult learning reforms succeed. It identifies lessons from six countries that have significantly increased participation over the past decades: Austria, Estonia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Singapore. To shed light on how these countries achieved this objective, this study looks at the details of reform design, implementation and evaluation.

In the wake of the technological revolution that began in the last decades of the 20th century, labour-market demand for information-processing and other high-level cognitive and interpersonal skills have been growing substantially. Based on the results from the 33 countries and regions that participated in the 1st and 2nd round of the Survey of Adult Skills in 2011-12 and in 2014-15, this report describes adults’ proficiency in three information-processing skills, and examines how proficiency is related to labour-market and social outcomes. It also places special emphasis on the results from the 3rd and final round of the first cycle of PIAAC in 2017-18, which included 6 countries (Ecuador, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru and the United States). The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some of these key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home. The first survey of its kind, it directly measures proficiency in three information-processing skills: literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments.