Tibor Palánkai

Tibor Palánkai was born on 1 March 1938 in Jakabszállás, a village in Bács-Kiskun county in southern Hungary. He finished secondary school in 1956 and was admitted to the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, where he specialised in economic theory.

He passed his state examinations and received his economics degree in 1960, and defended his university doctoral dissertation in 1961. He went on to earn the Candidate of Sciences degree in economics in 1973 and the higher Doctor of the Academy degree in 1986.

Palánkai spent his whole career at the Budapest economics university that began as the Karl Marx University of Economics and later became the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and then Corvinus University. He joined the department of international economic and political affairs in 1960 and was appointed full professor in 1982.

He was vice-rector for research from 1977 to 1983, head of the Department of World Economy from 1983 to 1995, and rector of the university from 1997 to February 2000. He then became director of its Centre for European Studies and Training, and he was made professor emeritus in 2008.

He also worked abroad for long periods: as a Ford Foundation fellow in the United States in 1966 and 1967, a visiting researcher at the University of Sussex in 1971 and the University of Pavia in 1987, a researcher at the Institute for East-West Security Studies in New York in 1989 and 1990, and a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges from 1992 to 2004.

His research focused on the theory and economics of European integration, with particular attention to monetary integration, the adjustment of advanced economies, energy and the world economy, and economic warfare. In the 1990s and early 2000s he worked on the economic case for Hungary's association with and full membership of the European Union. He led the economic policy coordination group of Hungary's Integration Strategy Working Group from 1996 to 1998 and chaired the EU Communication Public Foundation from 2002 to 2004. He was the author or co-author of more than 250 scientific publications.

Outside academia he sat on the supervisory board of the National Oil and Gas Trust, the board of the State Property Agency, the board of MOL from 1996 to 1999, and was vice-chair of the board of the Hungarian Development Bank from 2002 to 2007. He was a member of the Hungarian Accreditation Committee from 1997 to 2000.

Palánkai was married to Krisztina Kratochwill, a lawyer who served as a chief adviser at the Constitutional Court of Hungary. They had a daughter, Mária, and a son, Gábor.

Tibor Palánkai died on Monday 9 November 2026, in the 89th year of his life, aged 88. His death was announced the same day by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and reported by the MTI news agency. No cause of death was made public, and funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Palánkai is remembered as a defining figure in Hungarian economics and one of the scholars who built the study of European integration in Hungary. Generations of economists learned the subject from his textbooks and lectures, and his work on measuring integration and on monetary union informed the debate as Hungary prepared to join the European Union in 2004. His honours included the Academy Prize, the Middle Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, the Kautz Gyula Prize, the Széchenyi Prize and a Jean Monnet award.