ABSTRACT
Bulgaria acquired independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. The country’s financial experience went through several distinct phases: a strong expansion interrupted by sharp crises until World War I; a near hyperinflation after the war, followed by a short-lived macroeconomic stabilization in the second half of the 1920s; the Great Depression and the recovery of the late 1930s, followed by a second wave of war inflation; the communist era; the transition to a market economy in the 1990s, with a hesitant start and a clear acceleration after the introduction of a currency board arrangement in July 1997.
