Value for Money Committee

In order to improve the quality of the Value for Money project, we approached external experts in economics and public policy and established the Value for Money Committee as an advisory body. The Committe was established in February 2017 and meets at least three times a year.

The Committee aims to oversee the quality of the Value for Money project and its outputs. Key tasks of the Committee include:

• strategic recommendations for the project such as suggesting areas for spending review and assessing draft plan of spending reviews together with involved ministries;
• assessment of expert outputs related to the project (spending review methodology, analyses, etc.);
• supervising the compliance with the rules for the transparent publication of project outputs.

Members of the Value for Money Committee:

Gabriel Machlica 

Gabriel Machlica is an economist, currently working for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

Until 2014, he served as Director of Macroeconomic Analyses and Forecasts at the Institute for Financial Policy of the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic. Gabriel Machlica graduated from the University of Economics in Bratislava in Economic Policy.

Martin Kahanec

Martin Kahanec, an economist specialised in the topic of the labour market, is a lecturer at the Central European University.

He has been a researcher at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Economics in Bratislava since 2015. In 2008, he founded the Central European Institute for Labor Research (CELSI), where he works as a research director.

He received his PhD in economics in 2006 from the Center for Economic Research (CentER) at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Martin Kahanec studied economics at the Central European University in Budapest and international economics at the Faculty of Management at the Comenius University in Bratislava.

Juraj Kotian 

Juraj Kotian is an economist, currently a member of the Council for Budget Responsibility.

Previously he served as a director of macroeconomic research for the Central and Eastern Europe of the Erste Financial Group in Vienna. Until 2007, he was Chief Economist and Research Director at Slovenská sporiteľňa. He was a member of the tax and macroeconomic forecast committees at the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic. He served twice as Chairman of the Economic Analysts Club. Juraj Kotian graduaded from the Comenius University in Economic and Financial Mathematics.

Ferdinand Varga

Ferdinand Varga is a Senior Partner and a Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group in Budapest.

He specializes in energy market and its regulation. Prior to joining the BCG, he worked for ABB and Honeywell. He completed his doctoral studies in electronics at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava.