ABSTRACT
Since November 1989, Bulgaria has experienced a particularly difficult period of economic transformation, from a command economy sheltered by CMEA towards a fledgling market economy subject to the discipline of world trade. Industrial output has collapsed, falling by 66 per cent between 1990 and 1994 (Weiner Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftvergleiche 1995). Mass unemployment has become a fact of life as national unemployment has risen to around 20 per cent, with regional pockets much higher than that (NSI 1995:94).1 This sharp rise in unemployment has clear regional dimensions, and regional differentiation has deepened substantially, as it has in all reforming countries in CEE in the 1990s (Barta 1992; Murphy 1992; Pavlínek 1992; Zaniewski 1992).
