经济结构（英）

Economic structure
Feb 9th 2004
From the Economist Intelligence Unit
Source: Country Profile

Under communism, Bulgaria’s traditionally strong agricultural sector was supplemented by the impressive, but to a large extent artificial, development of industry concentrated on branches—such as steel, heavy chemicals, electronics, information technology (IT) and armaments—that turned out to be ill-suited to competition in a post-communist environment. Along with the loss of protected markets, and slow and botched agricultural reform, this led to a steep decline in output in the early and mid-1990s. The recovery since 1997-98 has been slow and partial in industry, and almost non-existent in agriculture.

A rise in the importance of services—services’ share of gross value added (GVA) increased from 29.5% of GVA in 1989 to 58.8% in 2002—has reflected less a move towards a modern, service-oriented economy than the decline of industry, with industry’s share down from 59.4% of GVA in 1989 to 28.7% in 2002. It should also be noted that the high share accounted for by services conceals severe qualitative deficiencies within the sector, and a high proportion of government services within the total. Nevertheless, tourism (a strong sector even in the communist era) has shown healthy growth recently, and real GVA in communications more than doubled between 1997 and 2002.

The share of the private sector in GVA has increased dramatically since 1989, reaching 72.7% in 2002. Outside agriculture, this is in part because of an emphasis on the restitution of small urban properties in the early post-communist years, and in part the result of more recent progress in privatising manufacturing and extractive industries. These official figures ignore a thriving but unrecorded grey economy. Estimates of the size of this vary, with most ranging between 20% and 30% of GDP.

When GDP per head is measured in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), Bulgaria ranks ninth among the ten east European applicant countries to the EU, with only Romania poorer.