Purpose: The main goal of this paper is to test whether older Hungarian women face age discrimination in the job market. The theoretical framework of this paper measures the level of discrimination and highlights that age discrimination leads to a waste of human resources.Design/methodology/approach: Two pairs of fictitious CVs were created; each pair included a younger (34 years old) and an older woman (60 years old) with an age difference of 26 years. One pair was designed for office assistant positions, the other for economic analyst positions. The contents of the CVs with photos were entirely fabricated except for active email addresses and phone numbers to allow responses to be tracked. LinkedIn accounts were also created for the analysts. Applications were sent over a four-month period from November 2019. The rate of invitation to interviews was analysed with mathematical statistical methods and a small probability model.Findings: The younger job seekers were invited to interviews about 2.2 times more often than the older ones. Based on the authors’ probability model, employers evaluate the skills of older applicants at only 45–67% of their actual skills.Research limitations/implications: The experiment had to be stopped due to the Covid-19 lockdown as there were no new job postings.Originality/value: The experiment demonstrates that age discrimination exists in Hungary. In addition to traditional audit job applications through HR portals, we used LinkedIn too. The small probability model applies an old framework in a new environment.

Both fertility and mortality rates are declining in the five Central Asian countries, so far resulting in an increasingly working-age population. The main question is whether these countries can benefit from this demographic transition while having different economic structures and diverse ethnicities. Our article shows the importance of demographic, economic, and human capital indicators and the influential role of governance indicators such as the Political Corruption Index and Egalitarian Democracy Index for economic growth. Based on the data from 1991 to 2018, the analysis has been conducted by employing fixed effect estimation with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors. The findings indicate that human capital with proper education and an appropriately absorbed labour force does have a more powerful effect on the demographic benefit. In addition, improving the quality of governance has a significant impact on economic growth.

The effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war on Ukraine's demographic landscape are immense. One key consideration is whether Ukrainian refugee women intend to return to their country after the war ends. If the return is planned, the question of whether they would wish to have children is also relevant. This study explored these issues by surveying women who fled to Hungary and the Netherlands. Among those surveyed, 42% did not plan to return under any circumstances, and only 12% intended to return even if their home area came under Russian control. Logistic regression was used to identify factors influencing the intention to return, with reluctance to have additional children and income earned through employment emerging as the strongest explanatory factors. However, we found only modest associations between the intention to return and other variables. Our findings suggest that deeply rooted personal preferences shape these women’s plans.