Bulgaria and Romania are neighbouring countries, which have always been rivals. Following the decision on EU enlargement to include Bulgaria and Romania (late 1999) and with membership negotiations already started (2004), the race between the two countries gained momentum and comparisons of...

The paper presents a brief review of the systems of deposit insurance in accession countries, comparing their level of harmonization with the perspective of their EU integration. Studying the different practices of deposit insurance in the context of developing financial safety nets in future...

Over the last years the efficiency and existence of an automatic adjustment mechanism of currency boards are in the centre of economic discussions. This study is intended to provide an empirical analysis of the volume and interest rate of unsecured overnight deposits at Bulgarian interbank...

Despite their progress Bulgaria and Romania significantly differ from the EU economies. In this article, on the basis of the theoretical and empirical achievements of the theory of optimal and (endogenous) currency areas we study to what extent the two South European economies are able to adopt...

Econometric forecasting models typically perform bad in volatile environments as they are often present in economies in transition. Since forecasts of key macroeconomic variable are inevitable as guidelines for economic policy, one might alternatively make attempts at measuring market...

The question of who benefits and who loses from the transition, the channels and mechanisms of redistribution of wealth in the post-communist period, and the relation between redistribution and monetary regime are, in our opinion, fundamental in understanding theoretically the deep systemic...

It is often maintained that currency boards (CBs) and gold standards (GSs) are alike in that they are stringent monetary rules, the two basic features of which are high credibility of monetary authorities and the existence of automatic adjustment (non discretionary) mechanism. This article...

The paper explores the possibilities to measure the institutional change in the monetary field. A political economy theoretical framework is built up, where the change of the monetary regime is analyzed as the outcome of the debtors - creditors interactions. In this perspective, the value of...

This study analyses bank lending in the larger context of bank-firm relations within the Bulgarian specificity of currency board. It focuses on the ‘intersection’ of credit supply and demand on the side of banks and firms simultaneously. We suggest both traditional and new hypotheses...

The importance of analysing inflation sources and dynamics in Bulgaria is imposed by (i) the long run process of price and inflation convergence to the Euro area and (ii) by the Currency Board operating in the country. In this study we make an attempt to estimate Balassa - Samuelson (BS) effect...