ABSTRACT
The main reason for the fundamental change in international price structures that began in 1973, which put the Hungarian price system under enormous and fast-growing pressure. The economic policy issues of the 1980s were increasingly centered on the necessity of economic reform. Instead, the key concept of economic policy was the creation of a market economy, or, in a more microeconomic approach, market construction. It is therefore particularly interesting to see how issues that were initially key, such as price reform, were pushed to the background while topics such as entrepreneurship, which touched much more on the sensitive problem of the structure of property rights, came increasingly to the fore. The establishment in 1980 of a single Ministry of Industry from the earlier ministries of heavy industry, light industry, and the iron and steel and machinery industries, respectively, was a reform measure favorably commented upon around the world, but it did not prove to be a very far-reaching change.
