Fighting the Economic Crisis: Could Bulgaria Be a Neoliberal Success Story?
Fighting the Economic Crisis: Could Bulgaria Be a Neoliberal Success Story?

Summary/Abstract: In April 2010 Bulgarian government announced an economic and social plan targeted on counteracting the swift economic downfall and hopefully, on helping the economic recovery. The way the plan was launched and the character of some of the measures created a lot of comments, rejection and controversy among the economic agents in the country. That inspired the main idea of that paper - to look more carefully into the plan. First section outlines roughly the global response to the financial crisis. Section 2 observes the government anti-crisis plan in some detail; the third features plan’s specifics summarizing it as a fire plan, comprised of a bunch of neo-liberal measures targeted on shrinking belts and relying on the self-sufficient ability of private business to overcome the recession. Section 4 tries to answer the question – why the plan is as it is - and pays attention to the objective determinants of the plan, to the “ideologemes” which frame the economic thinking of policy makers and points out the first results and the first cracks of that plan. Finally, the paper concludes that, a radical shift away from the neoliberal economic policy seems more and more as an unavoidable decision.

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