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Short-term fiscal policy of the new government: possible scenarios.
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The state of public finance by mid-2005.
The new government will take office in a time of unprecedented size of fiscal reserve, low level of public debt, and high growth of public revenues.By May, public revenues reached BGN 7.35 billion, or 15.3% higher than in the first five months of 2004. Tax revenues grew by 13.8%, with VAT and fuel excises growing by about 20%.Pu... -
Economic policy after elections.
Most parties in the new parliament seem to have no interest in new elections. For BSP, NMS2 and UDF this seems the logical choice, and the MRF is rather indifferent, but by all means satisfied with the high support. This means that at least in the short term this parliament will have to form a government. However, due to the var... -
The dollar inflation is only part of the story behind oil price records.
Part of the reason for the long-term rise of oil prices is purely monetary, viz. inflation of the dollar and of the euro. Prices of most tradable goods, not only the prices of oil, have risen substantially for the past two years, especially when we talk about metals. On average, industrial goods prices rose by 58% in three years... -
Economic growth reaches 5.9% y-o-y in Q1, consumer prices go down in May.
GDP growth accelerates for a sixth quarter in a row reaching 5.9% in the year till March. Growth was as much as 3.9% two years ago. Major factor behind the acceleration of economic growth is the favorable market conditions for Bulgaria’s heavy industries. For a few year now the soft monetary policies in America and in Europe ha... -
Trakiya Motorway concession would have a significant fiscal and macroeconomic effect in Bulgaria.
Privatization and deregulation in Bulgaria are often subject to obstacles imposed by the Judiciary. From the recent history we know that, although the formal justification of the judicial intervention is always check of procedures and their consistency with the law, in most of the situation expediency is the leading argument.The... -
Fiscal surplus grew in April, fiscal policy maintains restrictive.
The trend of restrictive fiscal policy through accumulating the current budget surpluses in the fiscal reserve account in BNB continued. In Q1 of 2005 we saw the usual contraction of consolidated public expenditures after the massive spending in the end of the previous year. They were lower compared to both Q3 and Q4 of 2004 lev... -
Credit stood unchanged in May, despite increase in monetary base.
Credit to private sector remains at BGN 16,421 by end May, revealing stabilization of banking lending.The M3 aggregate grew by 2.1% to BGN 22,490 million; most of the expansion was due to increase in monetary base. The latter grew by BGN 238 m in May, or 3.5% up from April. The fiscal policy continued to be restrictive, by pilin...