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Lubomir Lubenov, Anelia Lyubenova
BULGARIA’S FINANCIAL MARKETS IN AGRIBUSINESS – SIZE, STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT TRENDS
Summary:
The aim of the study is to establish the size, structure and financing trends of Bulgaria’s agribusiness. Improving the liquidity and turnover of short-term assets of farms is a goal of paramount importance because it also improves profitability. This necessitates diversification of the sources and instruments to finance the operating capital, such as credits, leasing, factoring, forfeiting, etc. At micro- and macro-level, the provision of information for financial management purposes should be improved to facilitate the access to public and corporate financial markets of short-term and long-term funds for the agribusiness. Public financial markets in Bulgaria’s agribusiness grew steadily from over BGN 1 billion/year during the first reference period of the common agricultural policy of the EU (2007–2013) to BGN 4 billion/year at the end of the 2014–2020 period. They also played an important role in generating reciprocal company financing of over BGN 3 billion/year of over BGN 7 billion/year of all financing in the sector. Structurally, short-term financing accounts for more than 2/3 to 3/4 of all financing.
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Hrabrin Bashev
AN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING AND ASSESSING THE GOVERNANCE EFFICIENCY OF AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISES
Summary:
This article incorporates the New Institutional Economy and proposes an approach for understanding and assessing the governance efficiency of farms. It corroborates that a farm is efficient if it manages all its transactions and activities in the most economical (equal or more efficient) way compared to any other organization. Moreover, farms must have a good potential to adapt to permanently changing market, institutional, technological and natural environments in order to have high (overall) governance efficiency. Nature of the problems in effective organization for the main farm transactions for securing needed factors of production and output realization is used as an indicator for farm’s comparative efficiency. The analysis of survey data found that the overall level of governance efficiency of Bulgarian farms is acceptable the efficiency of 60% of them is low. There are huge differences in the level of efficiency of farms of different legal form, size, specialization and location as well as in the share of farms with different levels of efficiency in each group.
Keywords: governance, efficiency, farm, transaction costs.
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Stoyan Prodanov, Stefan Stanimirov
DEVELOPMENT OF THE BULGARIAN INSURANCE MARKET - CRISIS CHALLENGES OF THE DECADE
Summary:
The present study focuses on the development of the Bulgarian insurance market in the second decade of the XX century. It examines the issues of the relationship between the global financial sector, insurance and the phases of economic cycles; the debate on the importance of the financial sector and insurance for the economic development; the establishment of correlations and dependencies between the dynamics of GDP and the dynamics of the Gross Premium Income (GPI) in the general insurance sector in Bulgaria for the period 2007-2019, presenting prospective reflections and assessment of the impact of the global pandemic COVID-19 on the Bulgarian insurance market. The linear model in a realistic scenario forecasts a decline in GPI of 18.2%, in a GDP decline of 9.0%. An additional assessment and forecast made using the model is that a decrease between 12.4% and 25% of GPI from the compulsory motor third party liability insurance (at the indicated level of GDP decline) will have a destructive effect on the Bulgarian model of general insurance, due to the impossibility to perform the social functions of this insurance such as the protection of victims of road accidents.
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Marina Nikolova, Marusya Stancheva Linkova
STATE AND PROBLEMS IN THE MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Summary:
The international scientific and practical conference on “State and Problems in the Management and Development of Agriculture” held in Svishtov on 4 October 2019 attracted a great number of Bulgarian and foreign scholars who work in the field of agriculture as well as representatives of the business in the agricultural sector. The scientific forum was attended by 83 representatives from nine countries and three continents; they presented 68 papers dealing with the organization and management of investments and innovations, entrepreneurial initiatives and diversification in the agricultural business, financial and accounting aspects, marketing, distribution and trade, information technologies, ecologization and sustainable development, legal and socio-cultural barriers of the general agricultural policy of the European Union. In the discussions during the scientific forum, we identified, analysed and assessed the current problems that accompany the development of agriculture and made specific proposals for their solutions on the basis of the expert capacity of the scientific community and the institutions that manage the agricultural sector in Bulgaria, as well as the needs of the agricultural business.
