The article presents the changes of the complex institutional relationship between the actors of labour (employers, employees and their interest organisations, and the state as an employer, owner, distributor and consultant) from the Hungarian transition to the present.

The genetic knowledge accumulated in the last few years represents an enormous value in biological and medical research. Therefore, it was and is only up to the collaboration of devoted scientists, that the genom of the human race has not been "privatised" – that is, it has not been sold to private laboratories.

In 2002, the American legislation adopted a new agricultural bill, under which $18 billion per year is given to promote American agriculture. It seems, however, that the highly concentrated food industry, owned by a few multinationals, will be the only beneficiary of the support, and not the farmers themselves.

Global warming is doubtless the direct consequence of human industrial activity. The energy needs of the permanent increase in temperature is not provided by human activity, however, it is initiated and catalised by it.

There have been many scapegoats found for one of the worst environmental disasters of the last decades. The "accident" of the oil tanker Prestige, however, was not a coincidence, but the necessary consequence of the unregulated – laissez-faire – globalised economic system, which can happen again any time.