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THE ROLE OF THE HUNGARIAN GOVERNMENT
government in the encouragement of the underdeveloped areas that were
mainly situated in the peripheries, and how and by which means it could
support these regions to raise them to a certain level.?
ORGANISATION OF THE SYSTEM OF BRANCH OFFICES
The necessity of state intervention had been proven by the stagnation of
production and trade that led to the low standard of the traditional lifestyle.
The contemporary economic literature painted a sorrowful picture of the one¬
sided, self-supplying three-year production as a result of the poor geographic
elements (unfavourable weather, geographic and soil features) as well as
the wrong choice of production, the lack of finances and the insufficient
measures of the liberal economic policy (landownership laws, especially the
laws regarding forests). Railway lines were built later and not to the planned
extent, despite huge investment. This played a significant role in the slow
development of the modern economy and the establishment of industrial
companies.
In 1897 the Ministry of Agriculture started economic aid-granting to
the Ruthenian farming people in Subcarpathia (East Carpathian areas).
From 1901 this aid programme was called “mountainous action” so that the
attention of political opponents of supporting non-Hungarian groups would
be clouded.* The mountainous action has been regarded as a special mixture
of contemporary social and national policies based on which the “usage of
new conservative social methods which were in the public administration
started."
3 Petra Balaton: Állami akciók a lemaradó régiók fejlesztésére a dualizmus korában, s. e.
Bartha Miklós és kora. regionális fejlesztések. Székelyudvarhely, Udvarhelyszék Kulturális
Egyesület, 2013, 69-81.
József Botlik: Egestas Subcarpathica. Adalékok az Észak-keleti-Felvidék és Kárpátalja
XIX-XX. századi történetéhez, Budapest, Hatodik Síp Alapítvány, 2000; Kálmán Vígh:
Borostyänköi Egan Ede, a hegyvideki nep jötevöje (1851-1901) Vasi Szemle, 50, 1, 1996,
86-95., Andrea Gönczi: Egy magyar kísérlet az alpesi gazdálkodás megvalósítására — a
hegyvidéki akció, Acta beregsasiensis, A II. Rákóczi Ferenc Kárpátaljai Magyar Főiskola
évkönyve, IV. Beregszász, 2005.
Miklós Szabó: Az újkonzervativizmus és a jobboldali radikalizmus törtenete (1867-1918),
Budapest, Új Mandätum, 2003, 176-177.
* 243 +