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The Gallup's, Euro barometer survey in the fall of 2003, in the United States, tested Europeans' disposition towards the United States and the European Union (EU) countries to ascertain whether the United States and the EU tend to play a positive or negative role in 5 parameters. The survey showed that overall, 74 percent of EU citizens agreed that the EUs foreign policy should be independent from that of the United States and highlighted the respondents level of desire for a distinctive European role in global politics relates.

The Gallup poll surveys indicate that Hungarians' opposition to war is widely shared across Europe. Many respondents were aware that the American military had chosen to train the Iraqis at Taszar.

In order to determine the levels of trust in the European Commission among the European Union and its candidate countries, a survey was conducted. The results show that a majority of respondents in the current member countries trust the European Commission.

The public opinion in the European Union countries with regard to the introduction of the euro currency is assessed. The findings show that euro is a trusted currency, trading about 5 percent higher than the U.S. dollar.

Part-time family agricultural production affects a significant proportion of the population in countries like Hungary, where the extensive industrialization process has been completed, and where the agricultural system has been collectivized. While the majority of these producers remained subsistence farmers the proportion of those who produce for markets, who could be regarded as 'entrepreneurs', has been on the increase. The purpose of this article is to explore the sociological character of family agricultural producers with particular reference to the emergent new rural entrepreneurs. We argue that current entrepreneurship could be understood as the resurfacing of the rural embourgeoisement process, which was interrupted by state socialist transformation of the rural social structure after 1949. We also assume that life history, the character of jobs people held while entrepreneurial activities were not possible, will significantly modify the impact of family background. With the re-emergence of entrepreneurship, the rural stratification system changes. While the earlier state socialist stratification system was a single hierarchy in which power and privilege were determined by bureaucratic rank, today Hungarian rural society can be more accurately described as having a dual system of social stratification in which the dominant bureaucratic rank hierarchy is now complemented by a market based system of inequalities. We stress historical continuity too in this respect: the rural stratification system in Hungary has traditionally been a dual one in which market based inequalities and entrepreneurship played only a complementary role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to answer the question why one out of ten families become an entrepreneur in Hungary, whereas the other nine do not exploit these new entrepreneurial opportunities. It attempts to explore the transformation of rural social structure during the epoch of industrialization and collectivization of agriculture in the state socialist society. The analytical focus of the paper is the rural semi-proletarian, who comprise the bulk of the rural population in Hungary and many of whom are gradually leaving family production and are becoming exclusively wage laborers. During the last decade, there has been a shift in trend. About one out of every ten part-time agricultural producers have become entrepreneurs. Authors of the article developed the theory of interrupted embourgeoisement in order to account for this phenomenon. The theory, based on survey evidence, suggests that only those persons, whose families were already entrepreneurial prior to socialist transformation in 1949, are most likely to be entrepreneurs of today and also that the occupational history of heads of households is likely to play an important intervening role in this process.

This study was undertaken to test the proposition that the relative levels of death taxes in the different states contribute to the interstate migration flows of the U.S. elderly population. A statistical model incorporating state-to-state elderly migration flows and the state death tax levels for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia was tested. The results of the analysis point to a separation of the decision made to leave a state of origin from the decision regarding where to move. The data do not support the idea that the level of death taxes within a given state contributes to the out-migration of elderly residents; however, once the decision to migrate has been made, there is evidence that the destination area will have lower death tax rates, but the effect is considerably less important than the impact of climate and other factors measured by the model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]