REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN BULGARIA BEFORE AND AFTER THE COUNTRY’S ACCESSION TO EU (Comparative analysis of incomes and expenses in the context of the EU Strategy 2020)

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN BULGARIA BEFORE AND AFTER THE COUNTRY’S ACCESSION TO EU (Comparative analysis of incomes and expenses in the context of the EU Strategy 2020)

STANKA TONKOVA

MARGARITA BOGDANOVA

Abstract

For the purposes of the comparative analyses, made in the present paper, for the regional differences in Bulgaria before and after its accession to the European Union, a number of indicators have been used for the change in the volume and the structure of the general and money incomes and in the general and money expenses per a member of household. In order to draw some realistic conclusions for the trends occurring in the changes of general incomes and the general expenses per capita, comparative analyses have been made for the regional differences in the incomes and expenses with those of the EU member countries. For these, as monetary unit have been used both the Bulgarian lev and the Euro.
The analysis have been made in several dimensions, as follows: the dynamics and the trends of change in the general incomes and expenses, of the money incomes and expenses per capita; the difference (the bias) between the general and money incomes, which allows conclusions to be drawn on the occurrence and the trends in the so-called non-money (natural) incomes; the difference between general and money expenses, which also is due to the consumption of goods and services of non- market origin (from household production or of the so called “gray” sector of the economy); the intra- group dynamics of incomes and expenses, which may be occur due to the comparative increase/decrease in certain sources of incomes or groups of expenses; a bias between general incomes and general expenses and between money incomes and money expenses, which show the level of consumption and saving and the non-market factors; the intra-regional differences in all the above-mentioned indicators, which depict a picture of asymmetry between the planning regions and the regions of which these very same planning regions are being comprised of. For the description of the inert-regional differences, beside the above-mentioned indictors some other indicators have also been used allowing to make conclusions on Bulgaria’s development trajectory before and after its accession to the EU and namely the index of human development and the index of happiness.

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