02.11.2016

"The 2017 budget is a European country budget which provides for quite meaningful policies in a pursuit of the best solution to reallocate the resources as effectively as possible." Minister of Finance Vladislav Goranov pointed out the above in "Zdravey Bulgaria" on NOVA TV. In his answer to a question about the differences in the growth projected for the following year between Bulgaria and some other CEE countries, Minister Goranov commented that there were a lot of factors for the differences and if one wanted to make regional comparisons s/he could find both better and worse performing countries than Bulgaria - "At the stage of the economic cycle in which we are, this growth is not sufficient but is much higher than in the years since 2009". He pointed out that the factors influencing GDP growth "are in general consumption, investment, imports and exports". In his words, consumption was affected by the environment - "the more one country is peaceful and the more the relations in it are normal, the more the economic operators start spending, stop saving and don't feel concerned about their future which enables them to consume and to be a driver of the economy". Minister Goranov said that there was good news in terms of investment, but there was still room for improvement and his assessment was that much was still to be done as to the way of resolving disputes between individual economic actors - disputes should be settled in court, promptly and categorically in favour of one of the parties. "This is what we miss; it is delayed and is one of the main obstacles to doing business in Bulgaria", he added.

"Investors have a very pragmatic attitude as to the tax policy of a country, the level of administrative service, the level of corruption, and assess whether they can do business or not", Minister Goranov said. In his words, the good news was that things were improving although not at the pace which we would like to see. "The greatest temptation for a Finance Minister is to manage a larger budget", he said and once again expressed his position that the current tax structure was good and would not be amended. "This is one of the good achievements in the budget recognised by all, i.e. that we continue to be quite attractive in terms of the tax system", the Finance Minister is confident.

To the criticism and protests that more funds have been provided for defence than for science, Vladislav Goranov replied that the resources for defence were agreed with the Bulgarian National Assembly in accordance with the common political decision, reached at the Consultative Council on National Security in 2015, that there were too many potential threats to our national security and that Bulgaria needed to fulfil its commitments to NATO by gradually increasing the share of defence spending in the total state expenditure.

"Growth in the funds for the next year is projected for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Agriculture and for science", the Minister of Finance pointed out. He said that hundreds of millions were provided for science in the European Funds, in the Research Fund and in the budget, but these should not fund structures but projects. In addition, Vladislav Goranov expressed his hope that the applied value of fundamental science for society and its relationship with the business would be found. The Minister noted that whenever there were good examples the state was ready to provide target funds for them, giving the example of the cyclotron at the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.