Reference Budgets: A Case of Bulgarian Food Basket
Reference Budgets: A Case of Bulgarian Food Basket

Summary/Abstract: Reference budgets are considered to be an instrument to build consensus in society about what is an adequate income. The predominant notion states that they should show the private minimum costs of adequate baskets of goods and services, so that after tax household incomes can be compared to the budgets to assess adequacy. The author presents the development of Bulgarian food basket for three clearly defined hypothetical households, namely a single person at active age, a single parent with two children and a couple with two children. All households are assumed to live in the capital city of Bulgaria. The context of the food basket is characterized by widely diverging eating patterns in Europe, a general lack of comparable data on food consumption and limited common guidelines regarding what constitutes a healthy diet. Secondary sources of information are used to develop a rough framework. Three focus groups are conducted in Sofia to create the food basket. The basket is priced based on price checks. As a result, a food basket (healthy and unhealthy) and kitchen equipment basket are developed for abovementioned three types of households.

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