-
Faculty
-
Education
-
Research
Research ProjectsDoctoral programmes
- Innovation
EconNet Team
The EconNet team has been forming at the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Pécs since 2016, conducting research on different aspects of economic networks, primarily in the field of connecting the network structure of economic agents with the stability and robustness of economic systems. Tamás Sebestyén, the leader of the team defended his PhD in 2011 in the same subject. Later, several researchers were attracted to join the research, thus developing the activities in the form of an organized set of researchers and activities, gaining more embeddedness and fundraising capabilities later on. The formal aspects of the team were grounded by a grant under the New National Excellence Program in 2016, then a University of Pécs grant in its TalentSpot allowed for activities to be organized as a research group, with 6 members. After this, the Higher Education Institutional Excellence Program and the Research Area Excellence Program (both running at UPFBE) provided funding for the research team, while a successful application for the ‘OTKA’ grant in 2021 resulted in a much broader financial background for a 4 years period, opening the possibility for long-run planning for the team.
People
Professor, Director of Research, Head of Department (DEE)
63150
sebestyent [at] ktk.pte.hu
B109
Projects
Vulnerability, specialisation and development pathways in global value chains
Globalization and economic integration have reshaped production and trade, creating complex global value chains. While these complex value chains have contributed to efficiency and national incomes, they have also increased the interdependence and vulnerability of economies. Transition economies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, face unique challenges in this landscape. They often integrate into global value chains at lower value-added stages, leading to economic duality where advanced, foreign-owned sectors coexist with less productive domestic sectors. This dual economic structure exacerbates vulnerabilities and hinders upward mobility within global value chains. Addressing this duality and understanding the pathways to higher value-added production is therefore critical to enhancing economic stability and development in these regions.
The research develops diagnostic tools that capture the divide between foreign-owned and domestic firms. This helps to understand the nature and drivers of this specific economic structure and to identify possible development paths within global value chains. It also seeks to understand how economic resilience can be built together with a shift towards higher value-added economic activities.
The research provides a comprehensive understanding of the dual economic structure and its implications for development and resilience. By identifying successful development pathways and the conditions that enhance resilience, the project will provide valuable guidance to policymakers navigating the complexities of globalization and economic integration.
This project, no. ADVANCED 150070 has been implemented with the support provided by the Ministry of Innovation and Technology of Hungary from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund, financed under the ADVANCED_24 funding scheme.
Risks, efficiency and development in global and national production networks
The research focuses on the structure of global production networks, the particular position of sectors/countries within it and the risks and efficiency gains arising from given configurations. In this respect, the proposal poses three research questions to be analyzed. First, what are the efficiency gains and possible (systemic) risks in particular network structures, which characterize global production networks. Second, how does a restructuring towards more locally organized systems affect these gains and risks. And third, what are the possible routes/strategies for upgrading within global production networks towards more value added and how these strategies are affected by the restructuring. These questions are planned to be answered with the help of an extended dataset on global production networks, and an integrated measurement tool, which reflects positional and structural properties as well as contagion mechanisms in risk assessment. This project, no. K138401 has been implemented with the support provided by the Ministry of Innovation and Technology of Hungary from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund, financed under the K_21 funding scheme.
Empirical and theoretical aspects of the structure of global and national value chains
This research project continues the previous work of the EconNet team in an organic way, along three complementary lines. First, the research focuses on the empirical analysis of the structural properties of global value chains, at the sector level, together with the embeddedness of these sectors into value chains. Second, we analyze shock-transmission through global value chains and the structure of this shock-contagion. Third, we investigate the possibility of expanding standard economic models with network structures connecting different economic actors, and how these network structures shape equilibrium and other macroeconomic phenomena. This research was financed by the Higher Education Institutional Excellence Programme as well as the of the Thematic Excellence Program 2020 - Institutional Excellence Subprogramme of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology in Hungary, within the framework of the 4th thematic programme ,,Enhancing the Role of Domestic Companies in the Reindustrialization of Hungary” of the University of Pécs.
Economic networks behind macroeconomic phenomena
The structure of connections among economic actors play an important role in shaping economic performance, especially on different macroeconomic indicators like growth and fluctuations in output or inflation. Economic and macroeconomic analysis has devoted relatively little attention to investigating the relationship between the structure of relationships between economic agents and the stability of economic activity: state of the art macroeconomic models typically assume complete and/or symmetric relationships among economic actors both in terms of market interactions and information flows. The research targets this gap, along two dimensions. First, we map the structure of networks established by input-output tables and co-movement of certain economic indicators. Second, we investigate how and to what extent do non-complete and non-symmetric network structures modify the predictions of standard macroeconomic models with respect to equilibrium and stability. The research was financed by the TalentSpot grant provided by the University of Pécs, under grant number 17886-4/2018 FEKUTSTRAT.
The role of network structure in the stability of economic activity
The aim of this project is to develop a modeling framework which is able to represent the role of interconnectedness between economic actors and provides a tool for analyzing the effect of these connections on different aspects of economic activity (output, business cycles, inflation). We use the toolkit of agent based modelling to develop the modeling framework, which is able to represent the detailed microstructure of the economy. In order to avoid the typical shortcoming of such models we start the model development from a model, which is widely used in standard economic modeling (this is the Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition). In addition to developing the model framework, the research aims to analyze a few questions motivated by network theory: what is the role of different network structures (random, regular, small world or scalefree structure, strong and weak ties) in explaining the path of different macroeconomic variables, especially in responding to exogenous shocks. This research gained support from the New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities, Hungary, under project number PTE/47252-3/2016 within the ÚNKP-16-4-III funding scheme.
Publications
Highlights
Kiss, T., Braun, E., & Sebestyén, T. (2025). Production network structure, specialization and unemployment: Measuring the structural resilience of national economies. STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC DYNAMICS, 72, 11-28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2024.11.009
Braun, E., Braun, E., Gyimesi, A., Iloskics, Z. & Sebestyén, T. (2023). Exposure to trade disruptions in case of the Russia–Ukraine conflict: A product network approach. THE WORLD ECONOMY, 46(10), 2950-2982. https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.13417
Iloskics, Z., Sebestyén, T., & Braun, E. (2021). Shock propagation channels behind the global economic contagion network. The role of economic sectors and the direction of trade. PLOS ONE, 16(10). http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258309
Sebestyén, T., & Iloskics, Z. (2020). Do economic shocks spread randomly?: A topological study of the global contagion network. PLOS ONE, 15(9), e0238626. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238626
Contact us
EconNet Team
University of Pécs
Faculty of Business and Economics
Rákóczi út 80., H-7622 Pécs (Hungary)
econnet [at] ktk.pte.hu
