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Governance of the Bulgarian Public Procurement Sector: Corruption Risks and Criminal Prosecution
Despite the legislative and institutional progress, especially in terms of increased transparency and access to data, the public procurement (PP) sector in Bulgaria continues to be associated with high levels of corruption risk. The number of irregularities uncovered by the control bodies remains considerable. At the same time there is a lack of effective investigation, while criminal cases, involving PP, are still very limited and predominantly focused on the lower levels of governance. more » |
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The Kremlin Playbook: Understanding Russian Influence in Central and Eastern Europe
There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia’s economic engagement with the region expanded significantly. Regional political movements and figures have increasingly sought to align themselves with the Kremlin and with illiberalism. Central European governments have adopted ambiguous—if not outright pro-Russian—policy stances that have raised questions about their transatlantic orientation and produced tensions within Western institutions. more » |
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CSD Policy Brief No. 64: Hidden Economy in Bulgaria: 2015 – 2016
In Bulgaria the high level of hidden economy undermines the economic development of the country and requires serious and persistent political attention. The unprecedented growth in the field of digitization of economic activities, the convergence between some of them, and the emergence of brand new services creates an opportunity for achieving a desirable environment, which may reduce the hidden cash flows and boost the economic development of the country.
Comprehensive reforms focused on the functioning of the market mechanisms and administrative effectiveness are needed in order to promote the process of economic convergence within the European Union and limit the harmful effects of the hidden economy in Bulgaria. more » |
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Shadow Power: Assessment of Corruption and Hidden Economy in Southeast Europe
The current report, prepared by the Southeast European Leadership for Development and Integrity (SELDI) — the largest indigenous good governance initiative in SEE — makes an important contribution to the regional approach to anticorruption. It provides a civil society view of the state of corruption and comes in the wake of the 2014 SELDI comprehensive assessment of the various aspects of the legal and institutional anticorruption environments of nine SEE countries. In 2016, SELDI followed up on these assessments with an update of corruption monitoring and a special focus on state capture in the energy sector and the corruption–hidden economy nexus. more » |
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Working Paper: State Capture Diagnostics Roadmap
This paper contributes to a higher analytical precision in the definition of state capture, which enables the construction of measures that would help evaluate, assess and eventually quantify the phenomenon. This requires a more in-depth analysis of the state capture concept and an analytical description of its outcomes involving different social actors (government, the private sector and the society at large), as well as a description of its principal mechanisms. As state capture is often associated with corruption, it would be necessary to differentiate between these concepts and find a possible intersection in the methodological approaches used for measuring them. more » |
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CSD Policy Brief No. 62: Energy Security Risks and the Case for Natural Gas Diversification
The Bulgarian energy sector remains of key importance for the development of the country’s economy. On the domestic side, Bulgaria’s energy sector faces severe governance deficiencies at multiple levels that lead to inefficiency and inconsistency of decision-making. Political meddling and conflicts of interest at the highest level of government compromise the strategic approach towards the sector, and often lead to poor management of the state-owned companies. more » |
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State Capture Unplugged: Countering Administrative and Political Corruption in Bulgaria
The eleventh Corruption Assessment Report of the Center for the Study of Democracy is focused on the most potent form of corruption affecting Bulgaria: state capture. The report builds on years of CSD experience in the regular monitoring and assessing of the spread of administrative and political corruption. This is now complemented by an assessment of the mechanisms by which powerful lobbies capture government decision making to the benefit of shady business interests and the detriment of public good. more » |
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Government Favouritism in Europe
A new study of the Center for the Study of Democracy finds that public procurement in Bulgaria remains trapped in the wider governance problems of the country, which still display the main features of a particularistic regime. This research is part of the third volume of the “The Anticorruption Report” policy series: Government Favouritism in Europe, produced in the framework of the EU FP7 ANTICORRP project. The volume reunites the fieldwork of 2014-2015 in the ANTICORRP and is entirely based on objective indicators, offering both quantitative and qualitative assessments of the linkage between political corruption and organised crime using statistics on spending, procurement contract data and judicial data. more » |
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