On March 9, 2012 Simeon Djankov, Bulgarian Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister announced that Bulgaria will repay its foreign debt using three sources of income. According to Sofia News Agency novinite.com these sources include “privatization of unnecessary State assets, short-term government securities, and mid-term 5 or 7-year Euro bonds in equal shares“. The proposal caused concerns expressed by Martin Dimitrov, member of the right-wing Blue Coalition. More about government’s proposal here.    

Slovak think tank INESS, the Institute of Economic and Social Studies, calculated the total potential risk exposure related to Eurozone rescue mechanisms on per capita basis. It is published on the institute”s new project website eurokriza.sk (“eurocrisis”). The Euro Bill summarizes total liabilities, guarantees and risk exposure created by bond purchasing programs, which were created as a part of the Euro debt crisis solution efforts. The total maximal risk exposure of each Slovak citizen is…

INESS released the Bill for Government Services for 2012. The annual price of the state for Slovakia increased by 2% and reached € 4,382 per citizen. The Bill has been distributed by Slovak major opinion making daily SME in January 2012 in printed form, reaching more than 70 000 readers. The goal of If you get caught driving practice test while your licence is suspended your vehicle may be impounded. the project is to explain…

Polish government began public consultation on the rise of the state pension age in February. It provoked a national debate about how long the Polish will work. There are numerous arguments for and against the reform. Some of them are just and other are demagogic. We should select them and consider issues which are important for us – future pensioners. It is essential because the reform is unavoidable and most members of the European Union…

We can safely mark this week as Greek. No, it’s not about action week in McDonalds but the majority of  messages that stirred euro came right from that country. On Sunday Greek Parliament passed new austerity package (199 MPs for, 77 against), so-called  Memorandum of Understanding, based on which Greece will receive further bailout of 130 bln. euro (or more if we count also 15 bln. euro which has been discussed since the end of…

It is good that an agreement concerning law regulating fiscal responsibilities is reached in our Parliament, involving whole political spectrum. It is great to put down the fire with common effort. It would be even better, however, if we agreed on reasons of this long fire of debt, who and how caused it. And one of the main reasons is the fact that politicans in many countries willingly listened to economic theories, whose implementation in…

There have been talks, for a few months now, about introducing new and stricter fiscal rules in European Union (EU) member-states, which would help reduce the fast piling up of public debt. During the last week of January there was, at last, a public debate about the position of Bulgaria on this issue. The debate was in the form of a round table organized by the Institute for Market Economics called “Fiscal Rules – Alternatives…