The article presents and analyzes various foreign models and policies for state- owned enterprises. The models of management of state-owned enterprises, the need for their existence and the types of state-owned enterprises are considered successively. The results of the article outline a wide range of national policies for state-owned enterprises. The main factors for their determination are a consequence of the historical development and the social commitments made for economic reforms. The existence of social goals of state ownership creates serious differences between corporate governance in the public and private sectors. The increased complexity in the management of state-owned enterprises stems from the combination of social and economic goals.

The aim of the present paper is to study the effects of euro adoption on the trade of goods and services. For this purpose, a panel regression model is estimated for the seven euro area Member States from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe that have most recently adopted the single currency. The studied period covers the years from 2003 to 2018. The results indicate that euro area membership led to an increase in both the exports (by 3.3%) and the imports (by 2.8%) of the selected countries and for the chosen time period. This paper contributes to the existing literature by empirically examining the effect of euro area membership on trade, by covering the newly joined Member States.

Joan Robinson (1903-1983) is an outstanding Cambridge economist in a variety of aspects. Being a member of the inner circle around Keynes and discussing with him drafts of the „General Theory“ in the early 1930s, she became an ardent defender of Keynes' original ideas. Her first major work is the „Theory of Imperfect Competition“, which became the standard model for depicting real markets as compared to the model of perfect competition. Her work on Marx reintegrated part of his ideas into economic thought while rejecting ideological Marxism. Due to her favoritism of left ideas, her disputes with neoclassical or orthodox economists, and her advocacy of communist regimes after the Second World War, Robinson is also regarded as one of the most controversial economists of her time.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided that the Swedish National Bank Prize for Excellence in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2020 will be awarded to Paul Milgram and Robert Wilson "for improvements in auction theory and the creation of new auction formats". Paul R. Milgram1 was born in 1948 in Detroit, USA. He received his Ph.D. in 1979 from Stanford University in Cambridge, USA, on the topic of information structure in competitive bidding. He is currently a professor in the Department of Economics and the School of Business at the same university. Doctor Honoris Causa, Stockholm School of Economics (2001).

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of Prof. Ph. Nikola Velikov - scientist, teacher, mentor, guide, intellectual, patriot, local historian, husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather. And most of all, a man, unique in his behavior, with high morals, bright spirituality, warmth, living so that he could not be forgotten.

Researches have been conducted on the key organizational prerequisites, elements and features of virtual teams (input elements), the key factors for their effective functioning (processes) and the immediate results of the activity of the virtual structures on the basis of the contemporary models of integration via the so-called input-process-output (IPO) scheme. The goal is to find a common theoretical and methodical basis that combines the fundamental models for the effectiveness of virtual teams. A new conceptual integrative model has been well-argued. The matrix of the input-process-output (IPO) model offers a different approach for transforming multilateral relations and factors into working processes, which is much more difficult to achieve in a virtual team environment than in a traditional hierarchical structure.

For the purposes of research, the degree of internationalization of business has been divided into two periods – the first covers the seven years before Bulgaria's accession to the EU, and the second period spans almost ten years after the signing of the membership agreement. А system of indicators, which are related to the production of tourist services, their export and the transfer of foreign investments, has been created in order to determine the degree of internationalization of the Bulgarian tourism business. The processes of business internationalization are considered from both a structural and a dynamic point of view, comparing the two periods. Emphasis is placed on the problems and difficulties in the business, as well as on the achievements and traditions in this field.

А study of the significant investors in the industrial zones in Bulgaria is conducted. The results of already established and functioning industrial zones are analysed in parallel with an evaluation of investor expectations. The study is not strictly analytical but offers solutions and recommendations with potential to improve the functioning of the industrial zones in the country.

This study examines the effect of trade policy on Nigeria’s economic growth and uses annual data spanning from 1983 to 2018. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller test revealed that the variables employed have a mixed order of integration (i(0), i(1)). Thereafter, an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique was employed because it suits the outcome of the pre-estimation test. A cointegration test among the variables was conducted using the ARDL bound test technique. The ARDL estimates showed that the adjusted trade ratio and the price-based variables have a positive impact on the GDP in both the short and the long run. The impulse response function for the estimated ARDL model was computed in order to confirm the accuracy of the Bound testing result. Interestingly, the findings remained robust when the potential effect of the trade policy was accounted for using the impulse response function (IRF) (see the Appendix). The IRF showed dynamically that the GDP responded positively to the trade policy at a higher horizon contrary to the short run estimate, thereby giving more credibility to the result of the ARDL which was being transformed by the IRF. The dynamic responses made it possible to find out that the GDP responded positively and negatively to trade policy, but that the accumulated (long run) effect was positive. The conclusion was reached that in Nigeria the adjusted trade ratio was procyclical while the price-based mechanism was countercyclical throughout the scope of study. The suggestion was made that the policy makers should adopt policies that can promote international trade and innovations, and can shut out any form of black market premium that may cause distortions.

The title construction of а dissertation and the steps for its implementation and analysis are discussed. The main elements and peculiarities that come into play when choosing the title of the dissertation and the titles of its subsections are successively analysed. An analytical review is made of the titles of defended dissertations in the field of economic sciences and an algorithm for recognizing the title structure of a dissertation is created. The findings can be useful for PhD students of economics, academic supervisors, students and anyone interested in the study of titles in the field of economic science.

The present article suggests a holistic framework for defining, evaluating and improving the governance of agroecosystem services in Bulgaria. The interdisciplinary Theory of Ecosystem Services and the New Institutional Economy are adapted, and an attempt made to define the governance of agroecosystem services, to identify its agents, forms and mechanisms, to formulate an adequate criterion for evaluating its efficiency, and to characterize the stages for its analysis and improvement. The proposed new approach is based on the building up of a hierarchy of agroecosystems and services related to its different levels, as well as an assessment of the system of governance that corresponds to each level of provision of agroecosystem services.

This research aims to visualize the "impossible trilemma", i. e. the impossibility of simultaneously having a fixed exchange rate, free movement of capital and an independent monetary policy, for every economy through the application ofartificial intelligence software. The advantages of visualization techniques are revealed. The explored countries are divided into the following panels: theEurozone countries, the developed European countries (DEC), the developed non-European countries (DNEC), the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the developing European countries and the Organizationof the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The results of the research show a great level of confirmation of the trilemma for the developing economies and the developed non-European countries. This implies that there is a compromise between exchange rate stability, monetary independence, and free capital mobility.

The goal of this research is to find out what determines monetary conditions in Bulgaria under a currency board arrangement – the automatic adjustment mechanism of the orthodox currency boards or discretionary policies of the government and the central bank. A time series vector autoregression for the period 1998-2018 is employed in order to investigate the impact of the fiscal reserve and the minimum required reserves of the commercial banks on the monetary base, the interbank interest rate, the money supply and the inflation rate. The empirical results indicate that the automatic adjustment mechanism does not function under the Bulgarian currency board but the policies of the government and the central bank have a discretionary effect on monetary conditions in the country.

The focus is placed on one of the fastest developing industries in the Bulgarian Economy – outsourcing. The main aim is to analyse the existence, strength and features of the relationship between some specific characteristics of outsourcing management and work satisfaction and motivation through an empirical study conducted in one of the leading IT outsourcing companies in Bulgaria. The main characteristics of outsourcing in Bulgaria are summarised, after which the empirical study and its results are presented in order to draw some specific and some more general conclusions.

On the book market can now be found the new book of Prof. D.Sc. Ts. Davidkov. It is a large-scale work with many addressees and is a natural continuation of other significant researches of the author. Studies on crops are main line in his research interests and activities. The work presented in book are based on a solid empirical data base. This fact, as well as the precise processing and interpretation, makes the results reliable and useful.

The peculiarities of the impact of the global financial crisis on the state and behaviour of European banks in the post-crisis period are revealed. The changes in the structure of the bank balances and how the priorities in their activity change under the influence of the difficult economic environment after the crisis are analysed. In the context of changes in globalisation, the European banks face a number of challenges in relation to the need to introduce financial innovations and the competition between the major international banks and the FinTech companies.

The “Data Envelopment Analysis” (DEA) non-parametric approach is used to study the impact of mergers and acquisitions in the banking sector in Bulgaria during the 2007-2018 period on the efficiency of banking units. The results of the analysis of the efficiency of the banks that went through this process show that, after the merger of the respective banking units, the acquiring banks manage to increase their scale efficiency and reach a technologically optimal scale of production several years after the merger. In addition, the findings show that most of them manage to reach maximum technical efficiency and are involved in shaping the boundary of efficiency of the entire banking system.

The increase in inequalities over the last thirty years has been supported by the statements of liberal economic thought. According to liberalists, economic inequality is a necessary condition to achieve the objectives of economic growth and market efficiency. The failure of the Efficient-market hypothesis, with the financial crisis of 2007, brings forth the need to reconsider the theoretical basis of perfect individual rationality, taking into account more realistic models of individuals with limited rationality. This is how the role of conventions in decision making comes into play, and more specifically the chapter twelve of Keynes’ General Theory, through the analysis of anticipations in condition of uncertainty, where the conventional nature of the investment decision is highlighted. But the Keynesian convention is insufficient to better explain how financial markets operate, when the convention is lacking. Thus, the present paper proposes a review of the “Keynesian conventional economy”, updating it in the “oriented conventional economics”.

The relationship between labor productivity and wages in the EU as a whole, as well as in comparative terms between old and new Member States is analyzed. Although the theoretical basis for such a study well known, some recent empirical studies put forth the need to rethink this relationship in the period after the crisis. In this regard, a result that is new to the Bulgarian literature has been drawn up with the help of modern panel econometric methods, which shows that there is an asymmetry in the relationship between labor productivity and wages before and after the global financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009. In addition, a further explanation of the asymmetry between labor productivity and wages, as found in the literature, is provided.

The paper examines how public money has been spent in public procurement in Bulgaria in recent years. With the adoption of a completely new Public Procurement Act in force since 15 April 2016, the Bulgarian legislator introduced the well-known in other EU Member States procedure - "innovation partnership". The main function of this procedure has been clarified - to create real preconditions for building a long-term partnership between budgetary institutions and private business, with the development and purchase of a completely innovative product as the basis of this partnership, and with the financing to be done entirely with public funds. In this way, the State becomes an investor in research and innovation, which then serves, on the one hand, to meet the needs of the particular client and, on the other, to improve the life of society. In this context, the steps to be taken in the innovation partnership procedure, its characteristics and its application in practice are outlined.

The specificities of the processes accompanying the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU and beyond are investigated based on the example of the interconnection between foreign trade and economic growth. The dynamics and changes in the structure of foreign trade in the two countries are examined from a comparative point of view, and an attempt is made to determine how they affect the economic growth rate. The analysis covers the period 2007-2018, which was chosen because it encompasses the time from the start of Bulgaria and Romania's EU membership until the present.

The article shows how some novel machine learning algorithms can be applied to economic problems of discrete binary choice. An examination is made of three typical business tasks – classifying overdraft applications, credit risk management, and marketing segmentation. Both traditional econometric methods (logistic regression and linear discriminant analysis) as well as five more advanced machine learning algorithms (neural networks, k-nearest neighbours, naïve Bayes classifier, random forest, and support vector machine) have been used for modelling these tasks. For all the classification tasks, the random forest algorithm robustly registers improved forecasting accuracy over the more traditional approaches. This underlines the need to supplement the classical econometric toolbox with innovative methods, with the random forest, the support vector machine, and the neural network being prime candidates.

Few U.S. economic issues in the last half-century have engendered as frequent political controversies as the minimum wage. This article looks at both the politics behind efforts to make the minimum wage a “living wage” in recent elections, and the many relevant economic effects, such as inflation and unemployment, from both a macro- and a microeconomic perspective. The paper offers several original conceptual models, in various economic situations, which examine the regressions of eight U.S. states over the 1996-2016 period. The results show that high minimum wages can harm employment, but that moderation can aid stagnant wages in economically-improving inflationary settings without drastically reducing employment short-term.

A review is made of the origin of the term “secular stagnation”, its historical development and the evolving patterns of the academic debate on the subject in recent years. A significant focus is placed on the debate over the modelling of the natural interest rates, the factors which contribute to the historically low nominal and real interest rates in many advanced economies, as well as the specific structural characteristics behind the slowdown in economic growth in economies such as the USA, Japan and Europe.

After a series of publications on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new monograph by Prof. Dr. Manol Ribov was published at the end of 2019.1 The aim of the research is to identify what digital transformation is, how it impacts and what can be done to harness it in the economy and society. The book is structured in five chapters, which consistently set out the author's views on research in the context of a digitizing environment and transformation taking place in technology, economics and education under the impact of digitization.

The impact of labour remuneration, inequality and poverty on the work motivation of the Bulgarian population is examined. The focus is placed on determining such levels of labour income that would stimulate the employed and their professional realization. The results show the following: that wages are а weak incentive among employees; that dissatisfaction with the level of remuneration is high; that the age and the education structure of the population have a significant impact on work motivation; and that inequality and poverty have little impact on economic activity.

Intangible assets are not a new object of accounting, but for many years there has existed a debate has existed about over their unsatisfactory accounting treatment within the regulatory framework. This in turn leads to the creation of financial statements that do not accurately reflect the economic nature of the company and do not provide sufficiently useful information to the users of financial statements. Therefore, article examines the rise of intangible assets in the context of a changing market environment and the problems associated with their accounting, disclosure and measurement are examined. The characteristics of the main approaches for the valuation of intangible assets are presented in a systematic way.

A model of competition on the electricity stock market is constructed using Cournot’s competition model and the supply function equilibrium (SFE) model. The main distinctive features of the electricity markets are discussed. The models are then applied to a market with the participation of four manufacturers (a nuclear power plant (NPP) and three coal plants). A specific demand function which gives a good description of the market characteristics is formulated and an estimation is made to determine the marginal costs for producers. Three scenarios are presented in order to demonstrate the applicability of the models used and to shed light on the effects of the changing market environment on prices and market structure. The transmission and distribution losses and the capacity constraints of the manufacturers are not covered.

The impact of exchange rate movements on the export sector in Nigeria is examined in this study through the use of time series data and the classical linear regression model (CLRM) estimation technique. The variables employed in this study are exchange rate, agric. output, manufacturing output, total export earnings, government capital expenditure, foreign direct investment and broad money supply (M2). From the result, it becomes apparent that exchange rate movements play a significant role in the performance of the export sector in Nigeria. More specifically, the findings show that exchange rate, manufacturing output, agric. output, government capital expenditure and foreign direct investment are positively related to export earnings while the broad money supply (M2) is negatively related. It is therefore recommended that the apex bank should keep a close watch on exchange rate developments in order to enhance exchange rate stability, which will in turn contribute to the development of the export sector in Nigeria.

A briefly summary is given of the path-breaking ideas of Gordon Tullock (1922-2014). Tullock can be considered one of the founders of public choice. He initiated a new way of thinking and applied rational choice theory to the political and juridical system. His ideas of rent-seeking behavior, majority voting, bureaucratic inefficiency, constitutional design, and the transfer of the public good problem to political decisions have become cornerstones of economic thought.

This fundamental and very important for our country economic topic is the subject of the monograph by Assoc. Prof. Dimitar Zlatinov1 from the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Economics of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski and the International Economics Section of the Institute of Economic Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The aim of the author is "to trace the channels of macroeconomic impact of fiscal and monetary policy in Bulgaria in the short and long term, taking into account the stages of cyclical development of the country in the post-2000 period" (pp. 7-8). The main scientific thesis that is defended is that despite the fiscal rules imposed by EU membership and the Monetary Council in place since 1997, the country "has pursued a discretionary and countercyclical fiscal policy. However, it is characterised by low effectiveness and efficiency and cannot have a real impact on accelerating catching-up economic development" (p. 8). The chosen research method is modelling macroeconomic dependencies and effects of fiscal and monetary policy on actual and potential GDP.