Attila Varga was born in Budapest in 1958. He graduated from the Faculty of Economics of János Panonius University in 1983, and in 1989 he obtained a doctorate from the same university. He received his doctorate in 1997 from the Department of Economics at West Virginia University. Since 2006 he has been a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and from 2019 a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
In Attila Varga’s research, he studied the regional dimensions of innovation processes and the potential for knowledge-based economic development. His econometric research on the spatial extent of knowledge flows between actors in the innovation system in the USA was pioneering.
Through his economic models of the United States, the European Union, Hungary, and Turkey, he has primarily studied the effects of policies aimed at knowledge-based development at regional, national, and supranational levels. The Geographic, Macro-Regional (GMR) models developed as a result of his work are used in many countries.
In 2008, at the University of Pécs, he received the Cathedra Gold Award for outstanding teaching and educational work.
