"Economic Policy Review" Bulletin ISSN 1313 - 0544

29th of May 2008 is the day of freedom from Government intervention (Tax Freedom Day) in Bulgaria during this year. On this date we mark the day on which the people, figuratively speaking, stop working for the Government and begin to work and earn for them.

According to some calculations, about 3 billion people around the Globe depend daily on rice and at least half of them are extremely poor. While these people starve, Japan must import annually enormous quantity of rice, which is never consumed. At the same time – China, India, Vietnam and Egypt put hold on their exports of rice in order to limit the growth of domestic prices...

Earlier this week the members of the Parliament passed after a first reading amendments to the Commercial Act, by which the required minimal capital for registration of a limited liability company and joint stock company was reduced 10 times – to 500 and 5 000 levs respectively, from 5 000 and 50 000 levs.

The reports of the European Commission and the European Central Bank on the convergence of the various countries were published recently. They aim at presenting the current state of the economies and their preparedness to accept the Euro as a legal tender. The conclusions from these reports are that Bulgaria is not yet ready to meet the criteria and as a result the formal membership to the Euro zone will not take place soon.

Two things could be observed during the last year in office of every Bulgarian Government – it starts hard spending (if there are money) and stops the reforms (if it has been making any), in order to focus on the coming elections. The current Government would probably follow this model and for that reason we would like to give some advice.

One of the greatest minds of economic synthesis during the 20th century – Josef Schumpeter studied the causes which lead to growth in an economy and mainly the causes connected to the dynamics of entrepreneurial development. Schumpeter views the entrepreneur as a creative individual, who finds “new combinations of production (factors)” in order to develop new products/services and to create new markets and/or new market niches.