Martin Ivanov

Convergence or Decline on Europe's Southeastern Periphery? Agriculture, Population, and GNP in Bulgaria, 1892 1945

The literature currently offers no consistent narrative about economic development on Europes southeastern periphery prior to 1945. Did per capita GNP in the Balkans converge with the rest of Europe? We present new GNP estimates for Bulgaria for 1892–1911 and link these with a new degree of precision to the data available for the 1920s. Our data reveal stagnation in per capita GNP from 1879 to the 1930s. But within agriculture we find evidence for a new phase of intensification from the 1920s onwards. The preconditions for growth, sometimes attributed to Communism, were in place well before 1945.

Regional Transformations of a State under Construction: Bulgaria, 1878–2002

Analysis of new regional socioeconomic and transport data in a gis format reveals that Bulgarias most dramatic transformations occurred before World War I, corresponding to the construction of the national railway grid. Contrary to expectations, the massive socioeconomic developments that followed World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall did not affect the regional economic order of the state.

Effective Exchange Rates of the Bulgarian Lev 1879-1939

The paper constructs the first series of nominal and real effective exchange rates of the Bulgarian Lev from its establishment in 1879 until 1939. The dynamics of both indicators during the Classical Gold Standard fits the general picture of exchange rate development of other European countries while their movements in the Interwar years reflects the exchange rate policy of the monetary authority and the price effects of the Great Depression. The study also provides econometric estimation of the impact of the real effective exchange rates and foreign demand on Bulgaria’s real export performance allowing for some policy implications.