Last week Bulgaria’s Minister of Regional Development and Public Works Nikolay Nankov presented to MPs options for a new zoning plan of Bulgaria. The new plan is not some kind of administrative reform, but a way to eradicate non-conformity with the Eurostat requirement according to which the population in each region must not exceed 800,000. Such a discrepancy exists primarily in Northwestern Bulgaria, though within the space of two years, it is expected to spread to the Northern central region as well.

The timing of the new zoning plan is no coincidence. A decision has to be reached by the end of the year because of the drafting of the new EU seven year budgetary framework (2021-2027).

Negotiations, in essence, on the new budgetary framework are expected in May, with one of the principal issues being the policy of cohesion. Funding for this policy is at risk of being cut down over the looming Brexit, there being a direct link between the European funding for cohesion and the new regions of Bulgaria. The planning or statistical regions under the European Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, NUTS-2, are formed primarily for the purposes of statistical reporting of the territorial units, in accordance with Eurostat requirements. But this zoning is also used to develop the EU’s cohesion policy and to distribute funding for cohesion.

The Bulgarian government is also setting itself another objective – to create conditions for a new regional policy that would no longer be an addition to sectoral policies but would contribute to a more balanced development of the respective territorial units. In this programming period this is not so and we are witnessing a concentration of resources most of all in big cities, whereas the population in the periphery has been dwindling, a phenomenon evident from the latest statistics regarding Bulgarian towns. Last year saw an increase in the population of five regional centres; out of a total of 257 Bulgarian towns, an increase in the population has been registered in no more than 25, the biggest increase being registered in Sofia. At the same time one more town has been added to the list of towns with a population under 1,000 bringing their number up to six.

Compiled by Stoimen Pavlov

English version: Milena Daynova