ABSTRACT
East European countries in general and Bulgaria in particular are extremely sensitive about releasing any information regarding certain types of foreign trade transactions. In the case of Bulgaria the areas most shrouded in secrecy are arms exports and exports and imports of crude oil and refined oil products. (Bulgaria also publishes no data on its arms imports, but it is not difficult to obtain a fairly reliable estimate of Bulgarian arms imports from the Soviet Union from mirror Soviet export statistics using the well-known “residual analysis.” Since the Soviet Union supplies the dominant portion of total Bulgarian arms imports, the level of total Bulgarian arms imports can be reasonably estimated.) Fortunately, detailed unpublished information on Bulgarian exports in 1982 reveals interesting information about the level of both exports of arms and exports of crude oil and refined oil products, which represent reexports of Soviet, Libyan, Iranian, and a small amount of Iraqi oil in crude or refined form.
