The EU can be regarded as a club where integration is the main club good. For decades, club convergence applied; however, currently there is insufficient level of convergence. The club theory approach becomes increasingly significant with Brexit and the remaining EU-27 heading towards a multi-speed Europe. Overall, the economy of the EU constructs a complex system implying the existence of sub-systems: clubs within the club. Dynamism is an inherent feature of the system. There are outside effects as well as factors influencing the system from inside, many of the latter rooting in the various capitalism models of the member states. In this work we analyse how the varieties of capitalism is related to convergence and complexity in the EU. In this context, the EU is an entity interpreted as a dynamic complex system of clubs comprised by countries performing a variety of capitalism.

Az Econventio Egyesület a Szegedi Tudományegyetem Gazdaságtudományi Karával 2011 óta fejleszti a középiskolások pénzügyi kultúráját. Tanulmányunkban az elmúlt 10 év felméréseinek főbb megállapításait foglaljuk össze, amely összesen 110 ezer tesztkitöltésre épül. Felméréseink szerint a középiskolások kevés és felületes pénzügyi ismerettel rendelkeznek. A pénzügyi tudás pozitív kapcsolatban áll az előre gondolkodás időtávjával, az öngondoskodásról való gondolkodásról, a pénzügyek iránt tanúsított hozzáállással. A digitális pénzügyi információforrások szerepének növekedése mellett, a középiskolások pénzügyi ismereteiket legfőképpen az otthonlátottakból merítik, ez negatívan hat a teszteredményekre, ugyanakkor a pénzügyi ismeretek oktatásának pozitív hatása van a diákok pénzügyi tudására. Az életkor, a tapasztalatok növekedésével a pénzügyi tudásszint nő, különösen a munkaerőpiaci, hitelezési, biztosítási kérdések esetén, ugyanakkor a felnőtteknek és a középiskolásoknak is ugyanazok a kérdéskörök jelentenek nagyobb nehézséget: százalékszámítás, a kamatos kamat számítása, a legalább, legfeljebb kifejezések kezelése, különböző ajánlatok összehasonlítása.

The Econventio Association in cooperation with the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the University of Szeged has been developing the financial literacy of high school students since 2011. In our study, we summarize the main findings of surveys over the past 10 years, based on a total of 110,000 responses. Our findings show high school students to have inadequate and superficial financial knowledge. The results show that high school students have low financial literacy levels. Financial knowledge is positively related to long-term oriented thinking, the opinion formed about self-sufficiency and self-care, and the general attitude towards finances. In addition to the everincreasing role of digital financial information sources, high school students draw their financial knowledge mainly from what they see at home, which influences test scores in a negative way, while at the same time financial literacy education has a positive effect on students’ financial literacy. As age and experience increase, the level of financial knowledge increases too, especially in the topics of labour market, credits and loans and insurance, however, the problematic areas remain the same over time, both for high school students and the adult population: calculating interest, compound interest, the meaning of expressions 'at least' or ‘at most’, or comparing different financial offers.

The Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) literature has recently manifested a dynamic development. Among others, the member states of the European Union (EU) have been studied extensively from this viewpoint, and main capitalism models have been identified. Yet, the global financial and economic crisis and its aftermath in Europe have impacted the member states' economies, typically in asymmetric ways and, in 2020, a highly diverse EU faced the COVID-19 induced economic crisis.Our study investigates the EU member states from a perspective different from the existing research on VoC in Europe: our starting point is the macroeconomic decomposition of GDP. Our findings draw up a categorisation somewhat different from the previous results: while the core of the EU is rather consistent and homogenous, clusters of the periphery do not fully coincide with geography and earlier typisations; there are also single outliers and ‘New tigers of Europe’ emerging. Nevertheless, the core-periphery divide still stands overall.

Citizens need sophisticated ways of thinking in order to understand complex, real social and economic phenomena and to interpret relationships among social and business data correctly. Huge amounts of data, data sources and visualization tools provide an opportunity to illustrate complex relations within real data. At the same time, the misuse of these tools can lead to misinterpretations and in turn perhaps to poor decision making. The Gapminder Foundation has developed several visualization tools (using bubble charts, trend lines, ranks, maps, etc.) in order to facilitate the exploration of complex relationships between variables, to rank countries, and to explore things such as time series, age distributions and income distributions. The goals of this chapter are to: show these different tools in action in classes exploring poverty and the ageing society; to describe their advantages and disadvantages; and to compare.