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The urban development methods in the 21st century focus more and more on the different kinds of IT solutions which are increasingly embedded in the operation of urban functions. Therefore, great attention has to be paid on them during the planning process. The so-called smart city solutions are of key importance from the cities' social-economic development viewpoint, and together with their rapid spread, their scientific analysis is very important as well.
This article deals with the growing importance of cities in the 21st century. Different factors affect this process. The first one is demographic change, the global increase of urban population. The second factor is the technological revolution, which significantly transforms the operation and understanding of our cities. The third one is the increasing economic role as well as the changing governance issues of cities.
After introducing these background factors of the changing urban environment, the article focuses more on the smart city solutions. Firstly, it deals with the differences and uncertainties of its definition as well as the appearance of the related definitions. Secondly, it introduces the scientific discourse of the topic, to illustrate the most important differences, debates and arguments emerging in relation with the smart city developments. The last part of the article highlights the social development aspects of smart city developments, their role in decreasing social inequalities.

The paper investigates university social responsibility at Hungarian universities by examining their websites. Although the concept of university social responsibility has existed for nearly 20 years, the scope of its research and theoretical literature still falls far short of that of corporate social responsibility. There is extant literature on the topic including case studies from around the world showing the importance of university social responsibility. Nevertheless, the scope of thematic analysis of the topic is very narrow with only a few pieces of comprehensive systematic research published so far, and the theoretical literature only highlights the work of some major researchers. Due to the complexity of the topic, the amount of previous literature attempting to explore the effects of university social responsibility is also limited. The aim of this paper is to investigate how terms relating to social responsibility appear on the websites of Hungarian universities. In autumn 2019 research was carried out involving twenty-one universities. The paper analyses how social responsibility is visible on university websites based on given keywords. The research employed quantitative content analysis. The hypothesis was that based on visibility the same university categories can be formed according to the size and profile of the institutions. According to the authors' present knowledge no such research has been carried out in Hungary so far. There are some university website researches in different countries but with different purposes with the special focus on sustainability. So the method of the present research is an attempt to find out how to measure the social responsibility visibility of universities and how to make categorizations based on the analyses. The limitation of the research is, among others, that universities have different search engines on their websites, which can lead to the misinterpretation of results. The main findings are that the visibility of social responsibility based on website analyses depends not only on the size and profile of the institutions; therefore, the investigation of visibility can contribute to the creation of new categories proving that social responsibility is far beyond the size or profile of the universities. The findings can help institutions develop the conscious communication of their social responsibility activity, and provide assistance to the research community.

Ethics do not appear from the vacuum. Researchers estimate ethics intuitively. At the same time, there is no quantitative approach for measuring the overall background of ethics in the community. This research aims to present a quantitative process for measuring the general level of ethics in societies.
This research aims at presenting a quantitative index of ethics. Researchers can quickly reproduce the results of this index, and it grants the understandability of its main components and the potential for applications. The suggested global index of ethics (ETPI - Ethics Perception Index) creates the basis for further quantitative analysis of the levels of ethics in each region of different countries by RETPI (Regional ETPI). This paper suggests it is crucial to apply a quantitative measure of ethics that is valid for countries and regions.
It is the first global and regional index of ethics, upon the best we know. The basis for the estimation of the ethics index is the evaluation of the components related to corruption, economic freedoms, human development, education, human rights, and environmental issues (the depletion of natural resources and other parameters). In addition, this research represents the method for an ordinal estimation of the level of ethics within different subregions. Such evaluation allows comparing different countries and regions in terms of the development of ethics. It is the first global and regional index of ethics, upon the best we know.

The exponential development of information technology and, in this context, the latest generation of open innovation systems result in revolutionary changes in almost every industry as well as in other areas of life. From the automotive industry to the energy sector and to tourism, newcomers emerge everywhere, building on the tools of disruptive innovation, which with earlier unprecedented speeds transform their previous industry power.
The essence of the smart city approach is to put the latest tools of technological advancement in serving the social, economic and ecological sustainability of cities' lives for the inhabitants as well as for the enterprises of the city.
Industry 4.0 is an imagined future, which in our opinion - in direct or indirect ways - would have a fundamental influence on smart cities and their environment and regions, given that their primary goal is to improve a country's competitiveness.
In our study, we review the relevant literature on the definition of and approach to innovation as well as the smart city concept in this new revolutionary age, we demonstrate relevant correlations between the concepts of disruptive innovation, smart city and Industry 4.0.

The paper focuses on the interrelatedness of the location strategies of the advanced producer services and the urban hierarchies in the Central European countries based on the 36 metropole cities of the region (9 countries), and focuses on how far the Central European metropolises are integrated into the international networks of the advanced producer service firms (APS firms). Along with the globalization process a transnational urban network is developing in the last few decades, the international flows of networks, information, labour and capital are getting more intense, and the global service sector tends to locate offices where a critical mass of highly skilled labour force and economic performance is present with high level physical and digital accessibility. This strategy favours the capital cities and metropole cities which are in the focus of my study. Which metropole cities can be more attractive for APSs and what are the underlying factors is the main question of my paper. The first part of the paper focuses on the location strategy of APS firms based on three aspects: the service value of a city that identifies the size of the nodal point in the network; the quantity of flows measured by the number of interactions among city-pairs among offices of a certain APS, and the measurement of network relations pointing out the ratio of all APS business interactions in the macro region appearing in a city. A complex APS location index is developed that sets up a hierarchy among the metropole cities of the sample. The second part of the paper searches for justification on the hierarchy set up, and on the underlying factors by analyzing several aspects influencing the position of a city. These aspects include the economic power of the city, the role of the city in business decisions measured by locations of production type of multinational companies, the role of the city in the administrative structure, the accessibility of the city, and other social factors, like knowledge. The paper offers answer on how the location strategies of APS firms affect the position of the metropole cities in the region, whether new division lines or peripheries occur in the macro-region.

The centre-periphery relation is a dual model (Nemes Nagy, 1998), several meanings of which can be defined, like locational, development or social dualism. This paper is meant to analyse one example of the manifestation of development - in other words: economic - dualism: this is the spatial realisation of access or exclusion that can be experienced in case of credit institute activities.
An important starting point for the issue is the business philosophy and operational distinction of Hungarian actors in the credit institute market (a segment of the representatives of global commercial banks and locally embedded savings cooperatives), and the analysis of the geographical range of their activities (Kovács, 2014a; 2017), and also the survey of their relationship to developed centre regions and lagging peripheral areas.
I analysed this questions with the functional distance indicator, which is a relatively new approach of the financial proximity in the evaluations of the Hungarian banking sector. This indicator uses some social, economic and physical data for the explanation of dualities between commercial and cooperative banks.

We had in 2010 a report to HSSV (Hungarian Scientific Society of Vojvodina) on development scenarios and employment forecast. The report and the conclusions are still valid. The development problems today are also current for Hungarian minorities who lives in Vojvodina.
We recognized that number of model has limitations to treat region as complex system and to characterize the future behavior. Therefore, we used a combination of a direct questionnaires and an expert scenario-assessment method.
We accepted that the most likely to achieve an economic development, which is strongly reflected in the role of the agricultural sector a certain level of small and medium-sized enterprises and remains a particular operation and stagnation. This indicates that this region of the endogenous levels of forces is not sufficient to form the engine of development. The economic development analyzes had indicated that the projections about the number of employees can be very important. The number of employees we could provide 22-year data series, which allowed the use of prognostic models. For making the forecast we used the SPSS ARIMA models. The forecasted results are based well by the R2 indicator.
The employment forecasts and possible scenarios of economic development are also point in the same direction, the region's communities, but also Vojvodina and Serbia, has to take urgent measures to make further progress, to prevent the region's falling behind.

In the study, we use the Beveridge curve to examine the labor market processes in Hungary, and in three selected counties, in recent years. The counties were selected on the basis of the highest public employment rates in 2019. The subjects of our further labor market analyzes were Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg and Békés counties. For the counties, the curves were made using two methods for the period 2013-2019, first the unemployment rate for the working age population (15-64 years) and then the public employment indicator were compared with the job vacancy rate. In the course of the research, we examined the relationship between the unemployment rate and the public employment indicator in the selected counties. To examine the correlation, Pearson's correlation analysis was performed. With the correlation calculation, we were able to get an answer to the strength of the relationship between the variables (in our case, the two labor market indicators). In connection with the coefficient, we examined the percentage by which one criterion explains the variance of the other criterion using a coefficient of determination.

The study focuses on the higher education choices of Hungarian-speaking students studying at Serbian high schools in Vojvodina. Due to the disorganized nature of Hungarian-language higher education in Serbia, Hungarian students have little opportunity to study in their mother tongue at state universities and colleges. A questionnaire was distributed among 442 students at 11 high schools in Vojvodina to find out about their intention to study after high school, their reasons for and against higher education in Serbia, and the reasons influencing their choice of higher education institution. The results were analyzed with frequency tables and word clouds. Eighty percent of respondents said they planned to continue their studies after high school. Of those, 72% would like to study in one of the Hungarian higher education institutions, while 25% would like to study in Serbia. Our results showed that for Hungarian high school students in Vojvodina, language is the most important reason when choosing a higher education institution, in terms of both a lack of knowledge of Serbian language and a desire to conduct their studies in their mother tongue. Other influencing reasons were favorable academic programs, future career opportunities, and geographic proximity.

Good quality services mean an advantage in competition; they help to keep old guests and to receive new ones. For a provisional enterprise, guest satisfaction is not only an objective but also an effective marketing tool, knowing that the repeated purchases and recommendations of a satisfied, loyal customer can be very effective marketing methods. But does high quality of services and satisfaction really guarantee the loyalty of spa guests? In order to receive an answer to this, we have questioned 300 Hungarian guests of Hévíz Spa in the dimensions of service quality, satisfaction and loyalty. We have evaluated the replies of 164 medical guests and 117 wellness tourists separately. The positive relationship between quality and satisfaction has been confirmed both in case of medical- and wellness tourists. In the case of medical tourism, the significant positive relationship between the loyalty dimensions of willingness to return, recommendation willingness and positive word-advertising has also been proven. In the case of wellness tourists, however, satisfaction and loyalty relations are less obvious. Regression analysis draws our attention to the key role of pleasure and satisfaction dimension, directing spa services towards providing joyful experiences! According to this research, we can also determine, that measuring customer satisfaction is not enough, as other factors affecting the loyalty of medical- and wellness tourists also have to be explored.

Changes in rural Hungary have been increasing rapidly ever since the government passed the Local Self-Government Act in 1990. The policies set out in this Act affected the local funding systems in Hungary negatively, which led to a rural-to-urban migration in the country. This paper examines the youth's perception of urban migration in Hungary. Data has been collected via questionnaire-based surveys among students of six high schools of the city of Nagykanizsa in Hungary between January and October of 2018. A total of 1197 filled out forms were collected. This paper has a triple aim: to provide an analysis of the interests of youth in smaller towns seeking answers to what would make them stay in such towns and start their careers locally; to identify the factors that influence their inland rural-to-urban migration and to find out what strategies of rural community centers work best in keeping them home in small cities. Based on our findings, recommendations were drawn up in order to initiate the development of new projects in small cities which utilize the arguments and needs of the local youth discovered in the study area of our survey.

As a result of the urbanization crisis taking place in the developing world, nearly a quarter of the Earth's urban population lives in slums (WUP, 2014), amounting to a total of 881 million people in the developing countries in 2014 (UN-HABITAT, 2016). Without effective intervention, these figures are expected to increase in the future, since the urban population of the developing countries will have risen by almost 1 billion people by 2030 (WUP, 2018). Slum upgrading is therefore an area of paramount importance that is realized in practice by taking one of two approaches: one of the most common procedures is external or expert planning, when identifying the problem and developing and implementing a solution is done by experts. In the case of the other approach, these steps are realized by members of the given community with a facilitator - this is called community planning. This paper compares these two planning approaches using two slum upgrading programs in Kenya as examples, and it aims to use the experiences gained from them to support the hypothesis that the key to efficient slum upgrading is the active involvement of the affected community in the planning process; that is, community planning.

The background of the current research is that despite the existence of a vast amount of literature devoted to the study of post-socialist transition processes, there is a relative scarcity of international comparative analyses on Central and Southeast European metropolises. The research seeks to explore FDI-driven transformation and development processes in Central and Southeast European regional centres in the post-transition period. The geographical focus of the analysis is limited to Central and Southeast European post-socialist states, while the scale of the analysis targets the metropolitan and regional level. The present study provides a brief summary of the first phase of the research constituted by literature review.

In the decades, following the political transition more and more researchers started to study the Hungarian small towns because of the increasing number of settlements belonging to this category and their dominant role in the urban network. The literature studying the opportunities in foreign direct investment do not deal or only negligently deal with the effects of social and economic processes on the life of small towns. After reviewing the different approaches of location theories, we can get an overall picture in the relation of settlements and direct investment. This gives answers to the specific forms of direct investment flow and settling in East-Central Europe as well. Besides this, the presence of German minority as the indicator of the settling of direct investment is a missing segment of literature. This study presents the partial results of our research, which aims to complement this missing literature and studies the presence of German direct investment in the small towns of Hungarian settlement structure. It analyses the historical German-Hungarian relations, through which it describes the role of German minority in the economy and the settling of direct investments. The research studies the sectoral structure, the special pattern and it differentiates the importance of German direct investment with the help of data from the available databases (DUIHK25-member list and creditreform.hu - HVG TOP 500 enterprises), structured in-depth interviews (leaders of settlements, directors of companies and civilian organizations related to German minority) and regression analysis. The impact of foreign direct investment on social life, its role in living a life of a small town dweller and in obtaining the title of township are introduced by two short case studies. One of the settlements is Bonyhád, having one of the largest German minority and the other is Újhartyán, belonging to the outer ring of agglomeration of Budapest. Besides their favourable potentials the presence of German minority plays a crucial role in forming the economic and social life of these settlements. Our study shows the presence of German direct investment adjusting to the spatial structure of Hungarian economy and its sectoral differentiation is specific to a given region.

There has been a long way from the paper-based registration systems to the electronic registration platforms in the business registration models of both for-profit and non-profit organisations in the market. The company register is not only a dominant form of registration for the legal entities (organisations), it is also a crucial business factor in the economy for the commercial participants. Major challenges in the development of modern registers may be categorised as follows: enforcement of market transparency, wide application of various possibilities imminent in the electronic schemes, guarantee of an as broad access to the market as possible (enhancement of the simplest possible way to enter the market) and the follow up of the new regional trends in the integration challenges of the EU (endeavour for harmonisation and integration or linking of the company registers). Notwithstanding these efforts, there is quite a difference among the models of the commercial registers in the EU Member States.
The following article demonstrates the still existing diversification in the EU Member States by showing certain selected legal models of company registers. In analysing these divergent models, the authors wish to study and posit the Hungarian model as well within the context of the EU.

Since 2010 employment policies shifted greatly compared to the time between 1998 and 2002. After the elections the new government started to revise the policies concerning education and employment. The goal was to raise the number of employed people in Hungary to 4.7 million by the year 2020. In the national labour market there are areas that are unique and employ labour under special circumstances. Such an area is the Lake Balaton Resort Area, the 2nd largest tourist destination in Hungary. The Lake Balaton Resort Area consists of 179 settlements but most of its workforce comes from 43 settlements which have direct access to Lake Balaton. Most of the jobs are seasonal, lasting from May to September. Nowadays we hear from entrepreneurs that they are unable to find workers even though qualifications are not required anymore, because many skilled workers use the opportunities provided by the European Union, and go abroad to work, the primary target being Austria where they work in ski resorts during the winter, or London, where they can find full time jobs and earn wages 5 times that in Hungary. This is the case for the whole region of Balaton even outside the tourism sector. It is important to underline that the labour market in tourism influences the employment situation in all sectors of the region. In this paper I wish to examine how employment rates changed in the lakeshore settlements of the region in 2011, and how much income was generated by tourism employment around the lake. I examine the income generating capacity by the share of personal income tax that local government kept for themselves, and by the value of the income tax per employee, this latter indicator allowing the comparison of the Lake Balaton area to other tourism destinations in Hungary.

Cultural attractions are often linked to unique features of the host population, and are often related to a national minority or a segment of the population that preserved their traditions. Ethnically or religiously varied countries may often have such unique attractions, that seem exotic and appealing to tourists. Multiculturality is often an attraction for tourism, offering generally an authentic experience for visitors of different backgrounds. Besides, an ethnically or linguistically varied population can also provide a linguisticaly more skilful labour force, that is more sensitive to the needs of visitors coming from different cultures, and thus create a more comfortable environment for them.
The issue of multicultural societies has recently become a sensitive issue, due to global mass migration. There is a belief that ethnic or cultural fractionalisation would necessarily bring about difficulties of understanding and cooperation, leading to lower economic performance, less stable economic and social processes and, ultimately a slowdown of economic output. The resulting conflicts, difficulties may frighten away tourists and lead to the vulnerability of the tourism sector in very heterogeneous countries. On the other hand, ethnic fractionalisation and the resulting cultural diversity can be welcome as valuable resources as the varied pool of knowledge, traditions, skills, customs, that can enhance innovative ideas and creativity.
In the present paper evidence is looked for the relationship between ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity and tourism performance in a cross-country statistical analysis of 155 countries of the world. Statistical analysis of 155 countries show, that although there is a tendency of lower tourism performance with greated fractionalisation of the society, the most popular and successful tourism destinations are often multicultural and multiethnic societies.

The industry in East-Central Europe has integrated into global production networks in the last quarter century. Modern reindustrialization is considerably expected in the region, meanwhile it has emerged that those works leaning on cheap labour do not provide close-up perspectives in the long run: the 'upgrading' has become the main objection, namely to join the international industrial diversification. This case study aims to present the current Hungarian footwear industry. The study, based on statistics data and interviews, as well as information collected at the Union of Leather and Footwear Industry, focuses on how the participants of the sector integrate into global production networks and what are its consequences.

The public administration of the modern age and the significant changes taking place in the public administration in these days gave rise to the lecture. After a brief review of the historical antecedents a multi-stage process of reforms is mentioned as a result of which the so called closed system of public administration of Hungary became loose in a sense and the stiff margins which hindered the realization of the human resource management functions and presented a parting line between the establishments of the civil service and the competitive sector have been altered in a certain way. The present study deals with the direction towards which the present system proceeds and also with some management functions (e.g. performance evaluation) the importance of which is stressed greatly in the past few years. Finally a new field of research is dealt with which examines the efficiency of the personal development trainings as a special segment of these changes.

Tourism destination management (TDM) is a popular catchword of current tourism research. A research, co-financed by the European Union through the Hungary-Croatia IPA Cross-border Co-operation Programme, within the project 'Health &Rural Tourism DM Model' (project no.: HUHR/1101/2.1.3/0006), was carried out in 2013 to analyse the specialities of TDM in health tourism destinations, the physical and human resources of such destinations, aspects of sustainability and competitiveness, the main factors of success. Primary data were collected by surveys and interviews carried out in six spa towns of Western Hungary. The main findings indicated, that the major natural natural endowment is medicinal water in the research area, tourism infrastructure and superstructure are sufficient, although the range of services, and marketing of health tourism services should be improved. Destination management organisations perform least efficiently in attracting investors. The attitudes of stakeholders of the tourism sector towards the idea of TDM differ, while in less successful destinations they are more inclined to cooperate this way, they are rather reluctant to do so in successful destinations. Assessing the traits of tourism service providers, the natural assets, the local community and the targeted tourist segments a general model of health tourism destinations is outlined by the four componenets of the well-known VICE model.

Markets are increasingly considered as gastronomy tourism attractions, food - and its origin - becoming a meaningful souvenir for visitors and tourists. Within this context, this research note aims to analyse the origin of cheeses delivered in city markets. To achieve it, the Spanish municipal market of Valencia was studied, where a total of 267 cheeses were classified according to their provenance. Findings show a similar presence of local, national and international cheeses. The originality of this study lies on the implications that the origin of food may have for cultural, gastronomy and cheese tourism practices.

Since Max Weber, economists suggest that religious activity affects the European economic development, and this hypothesis was proven between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Accordingly Protestant economic thinking accelerated the evolving system of capitalism, giving adequate attitudes to the accumulation of wealth. This research supposes that the mentioned capitalist approaches have their own impressions on visual arts, particularly on modern painting. It examines almost nine hundred religious paintings from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, investigating signs of business activities on the artworks. This form of qualitative examination apply the methodology of content analysis. As a result of the study the former hypothesis of Weber could be verified from multidisciplinary approach.

Since the 1990s the metropolitan region and its governance has got into the focus of regional science again. Nowadays a newer wave of metropolitan governance is authoritative, which has exceeded the former administrative-territorial planning aspects, and has appeared on the scene as the mechanism of economic development policy. Examining the development stages of regional policy it is well-known that the classical (modern) approach was superseded by the postmodern one. While the national methods applied in the classical period were characterized by strictness, central regulation, indirect regulation of the market (Fordist approach), in the postmodern period flexibility, decentralization and direct regulation have come to the fore (Post-Fordism). In the postmodern period the state level also takes its role in the financing of innovation and research&development, and the notions of networking and competitiveness are coming more and more to the fore.
In this article I analyze these processes through the case study of Győr. After the theoretical introduction I examine the tools of economic development and economic governance in the Győr metropolitan region. Activities observed in Győr can strengthen the view-point that the processes of economic development and economic governance have nowadays been going on in parallel with each other. Moreover, the co-ordinating activities of local authorities can be observed in the work of organizations that support economic governance. In the course of the research it was also confirmed that built infrastructure can serve as a fundamental condition for the cooperation of network-systems that operate the governance system of a municipality.

Since the emergence of complementary currencies in the 1980s there have been numerous attempts to classify them, despite that the terms local currency, community currency and many others describing place-based monetary tools are not considered similarly by scholars. The local currencies take many forms, and local governments play different roles in their emergence and development. In Hungary there has been an increasing attention and discussion around the idea of implementing these alternative monetary tools. There is a growing number of working complementary currencies in Hungary, but academic research focuses mostly on whether these can contribute to the local development and what kind of effects they have.
The aim of this paper is to present a possible categorization of Hungarian complementary currencies based on the role local governments played in their implementation. I evaluate whether these community currencies are effective at first, and attempt to categorize them based on their purpose, association form and their relationships with local governments, with the purpose of increasing awareness for these initiatives in the process of policy-making.

The aim of the paper is to evaluate differences in the quality perception among particular segments of demand. Data for analysis were collected by means of the questionnaire survey among clients of accommodation establishments. The research in accommodation establishments succeeded to identify four factors of the perception of quality of services provided in those establishments, when only accommodation and catering services were taken into consideration. The most important factor of evaluation of quality of services provided in accommodation establishments emerged to be the factor "environment of the accommodation establishment". Other important factors are hygiene of the accommodation establishment, service in the catering part of the accommodation establishment and quality of meals.

Food festivals are a mainstay of the festival sector and some surveys show that they currently account for 30 percent. Despite this, we know very little about this important part of event tourism, and its economic and social impacts. This study tries to show, by econometric methods, the impacts on the local economy made by food festivals - and, at the same time, fhe effects -of the multiplicator and spillover factors.
This paper looks for some correlation between the local index-number of tourism and gastronomic festivals, using data from more than 200 events and festivals and 123 settlements. The first step in the survey was to determine two tourism factors, and this was followed by our methodological studies of these factors.
Although the summarized conclusions may not support the general opinion as can be found in the relevant literature - that is, a positive correlation between gastronomic festivals and local tourism, new research directions are revealed.

The social and solidarity economy (SSE) is an emerging sector of the European economies. It's importance is demonstrated by millions of employees and significant share of GDP. In recognition of its perceptivity, ministries dedicated to SSE have been established in many countries. However, there is a lively debate about on the definition of SSE itself. Opinions on the role of employment, the relations to governments and attitudes to competitiveness differ from each other. In the first part of my paper a clarification of the conceptual issues will be summarized. After that we may follow our investigations on SSE in two directions. First, we will see the special appearance of the SSE in rural areas and then the situation in Hungary will be presented. As an intersection of this two lines, SSE initiatives in the Hungarian rural areas will be discussed. We can speak about the role of the social land programs, the cooperatives, the LEADER groups and the "START" public work in building SSE in the Hungarian rural space.

Health tourism is one of the main development areas of tourism in Hungary. Health tourism development projects may initiate orders to the construction industry, preserve jobs, create new value and new jobs, and the multiplier effect may be beneficial for small and medium size enterprises in the surroundings of the investments. They can effectively contribute towards diminishing spatial and regional discrepancies, as thermal reservoirs are situated under 70% of the total land area of Hungary.
The paper presents the results of a survey carried out in 2010 in three spa towns in the western part of Hungary. The objective of the research was to identify the role of spa tourism in the competitiveness of the three Hungarian counties (Baranya, Somogy and Zala) of the Croatian-Hungarian border area. The survey was focused on the local population of the three towns, and on the visitors of the spas. The objective was to identify the key success factors of spa development, the level of tourist satisfaction, the impacts of the spa on the local community. The survey was a part of a large project that analysed the role of health tourism in improving the competitiveness of the Croatian - Hungarian border region.
The surveys were completed in August and September 2010, in three spa towns - Hévíz, Harkány and Nagyatád - on samples of 100 residents and 100 spa visitors, in each town.
Generally local residents showed a positive attitude towards the spa as an attraction for leisure and pleasure, appreciating bathing more than healing. They are rather satisfied with the spa services, but food and drinks, and fitness services are considered of lower quality. In Hévíz the spa prices were considered too high for value, and this is really the most expensive spa of the three. The local residents of Harkány complained about technical improvements needed, while the citizens of the small town Nagyatád were very satisfied with their spa.
In Nagyatád the spa was considered less important in the socioeconomic life of the town than in the other two famous spa towns. However, in Hévíz and Nagyatád the incomes earned and carreer prospects in the spa and related hotels were considered worse than the town average. The relationship between town leadership and spa were considered rather negative in Harkány. Local residents have positive feelings towards tourists, but the positive impacts of tourism are felt only in Hévíz, although here parking problems and high prices were felt as negative impacts. In Harkány the low number of tourists and the high prices were the main negative aspects, while in Nagyatád no negative impacts of tourism were felt.
The most marked differences in the visitors of the three spas are with respect to age, length of stay, the motivation and purpose of visit, the accommodation taken, the daily spending and cost of accommodation, and the opinions on the spa services. While the tipical visitor to Hévíz is elderly, near the pensioner age, and stays for about two weeks for a medical treatment, paying a high price for the accommodation, who is not completely satisfied with the services offered by the spa and by the town, the typical visitor to Harkány is rather similar, but spends much less on accommodation. The visitors to Nagyatád, however, are 3-4 years younger, spend only a