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In the first decade of EU membership, the Hungarian economy was unable to take advantage of the economic potential of the accession. The expansion of export markets and rapidly deepening financial integration opened up new growth opportunities, but the improved access to external financing conserved the unsustainable financing model. External indebtedness of the government increased and private sector used foreign loans to finance excessive consumption instead of financing new investments, and the foreign-owned banks increased the volume of retail FX loans. Thus, when the global financial crisis hit Hungary, a further escalation of that could be prevented by the loan agreement extended by the EU and the IMF. In this period, EU transfers played an important role as they helped to prevent an economic recession. Transformation of the country’s financing model based on a new strategy started in 2010. As a result of a significant increase in domestic savings, the repayment of external loans began. As before, EU funds supported economic growth in Hungary, but now they worked in tandem with the domestic development strategy. As a result, in terms of external vulnerability indicators, Hungary not only worked off its shortfall compared to the Visegrad region but sometimes even became one of the leaders.

With the progress of globalisation, due to the cross-border movement of the factors of production, there is a gap between the output of the Hungarian economy and the primary income generated by production, allocable to residents. The GDP-GNI gap shows the difference between the performance of the domestic economy and the primary income allocable to the individual sectors of the economy, and it also provides useful information on the current burdens of the country’s accumulated net foreign liabilities. This paper presents the factors that have influenced the changes in the GDP-GNI gap in recent years and examines how the income of the individual economic sectors has changed, breaking down the available data by industries and countries. We examine the correlation between the GDP-GNI gap and the development of the economy by analysing the international developments and regional trends, and then try to survey the trends that determine the domestic GDP-GNI gap over the short and long term. We find that, due to the anticipated growth in the income of foreign-owned companies, the GDP-GNI gap may increase over the short run, while its long-term trend depends significantly on whether the convergence of the Hungarian economy with the Western countries is implemented from external or internal funds.