Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol1-1 > Bulgaria

In the last few years, the country has attracted significant foreign direct investments. In 2007, investments showed record-breaking values of E6.1bn. The current account deficit widened from 6.8% of GDP in 2004 to about 20% of GDP in 2007. Financing of the deficit has been supported in the short term by very strong flows of net FDI.

According to the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) 2007, Bulgaria is a catching-up country. Although its scores are significantly below the EU average, they are inching upwards. In 2007, the Bulgarian national innovation system was still at an initial stage of its market development and it continues to display certain significant imbalances compared with European best practices. Most of the European Innovation Scoreboard for Bulgaria (EIS 2007) indicators are in the range of low to medium low. It performs relatively well on the Innovation Drivers Dimension, where it is above the EU average on the indicator of youth education attainment level, but shows a relatively weaker performance in the Intellectual Property dimension. Bulgaria is also below the EU average in terms of its innovation efficiency, in transforming innovation inputs into Applications and Intellectual Property outputs.

Main innovation challenges

• Increase the R&D expenditure (private and public).
• Stimulate partnership and increase the co-operation between science institutions, enterprises and other institutions involved in the innovative process.
• Increase the competitiveness of Bulgarian products and high-tech export in the total exports, based on higher innovativeness.

Action

Currently the innovation system in Bulgaria is underdeveloped and faces significant challenges. R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP remained at about 0.5%, while a mere amount was spent by businesses, and the bulk of the remaining share was spent on wages and social security contributions for R&D staff, employed by the state. The technological level of enterprises is relatively low; the link between business and science is missing or considerably weakened. The innovation promoting infrastructure (incubators, parks) is either missing or in its initial stage. The research centres are primarily state owned, because the number of researchers in enterprises is small. The proposed measures in the National Innovation Strategy and the issues in the National Reform Programme (NRP) focus on the following priorities: improvement of the overall framework for R&D and innovative activities; development; and improvement of intellectual property protection.