While Sofia plans to use the high-level summit in Sofia to increase exports to Russia, economists are skeptical that the talks can changes matters overnight. Prime Minister's Vladimir Putin's scheduled visit to Bulgaria, which begins on Saturday, will concentrate on bilateral trade relations as well as major energy projects. Last week, Bulgaria's Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, said Sofia needed to regain its former important position in Russian markets. Zhelyu Dobrev, chair of the Bulgarian-Russian Chamber of Commerce, said he also hoped for an increase in trade.
"In the next three years, Sofia could double its exports to Moscow to a billion US dollars per year and attract around 500,000 Russian tourists, compared to 245,000 last year," But some Bulgarian economists doubt high-level summits of this kind can do much to change trading patterns between countries overnight. “There’s no chance that the prime minister can say 'Let’s double exports to Russia' and that it will happen just like that," Petar Ganev, from the Institute for Market Economy, said.
In the Communist era, when Bulgaria was the closest Eastern European satellite to the Soviet Union, the Balkan country enjoyed a favourable position in Russian markets. But after the democratic changes in Bulgaria, exports to Russia fell drastically from a value of about 672 million US dollars in 1992 to only 91.5 million US dollars in 2002, ministry of economy data show. Since then, the downward trend has been slowly reversing. In 2009, the value of Bulgarian exports to Russia exceeded 415 million US dollars. By August this year, Bulgaria exports to Russia had reached a value of around 373 million US dollars, which was almost 54 per cent up on the same period last year.
News source: BalkanInsight link: article
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