One of the fundamental reforms - if “reform” is the correct word to use in this specific case – the authorities envisage with national budget 2015, is to cut financing for salaries in public administration. They say that would keep the budget deficit within 3 percent of the GDP, as stipulated by the EU.

In Bulgaria a little over 3 million people are employed; a quarter of them in the public sector, i.e. they receive their salaries from the national and local budgets. This expenditure isn’t too much, nor is it too little seeing as the average monthly salary is EUR 450.

Sociologists, politicians and economists all agree that the most valuable asset in any business or social system is the human resource. Because intelligent growth, something on which both Europe and Bulgaria have been setting such great store by, is impossible without the brains, the skills, the quests, the innovations and the work of people, experts, administrators. In Bulgaria’s case this is even more important as the country is small and poor and the only resource it can hope to develop with some measure of success is nature and people.

But the budget salary cuts in the administration are a manifest gesture of contempt for the human factor, for the role people play in modern society. We can never expect the administration of the country, of the individual public institutions and structures to improve while material incentives for the people working there are being curtailed.

Paradoxically, parallel with the redundancies and salary cuts in public administration, the Bulgarian authorities have been making considerable efforts to convince Brussels how important the problems of human resources are and just how dear to their heart the outgoing Operational Programme Administrative Capacity and the similar new Operational Programme called Good Governance is. The new operational programme which will cover the 2014-2020 period has as its top priority “Good governance and access to quality administrative services” and will spend EUR 500 million for financing measures to this aim.

So, on the one hand we are cutting staff financing, but on the other we want Brussels’ financial support for improving the way the public administration is functioning.

This glaring disparity and the negative results the new restrictive measures against public administration staff are bound to have did not go unnoticed even by current cabinet ministers, or by the trade unions who firmly opposed them.

One curious and significant fact, illustrating the incoherent state policy pursued with regard to earnings is that a little before they decided to slash salaries in the public sector, the MPs actually raised their own pay, so now their base monthly salary stands at over EUR 1,300.

English: Milena Daynova