site.btaSocial Minister Hristoskov: We Had the Most Slipshod Election Campaign

114 POLITICS-SOCIAL MINISTER-ELECTIONS-COMMENT

Social Minister Hristoskov: We Had
the Most Slipshod
Election Campaign


Sofia, October 6 (BTA) - "We had a most slipshod election
campaign without any ideas, without clear-cut positions on
Bulgaria's economic and social development," Deputy Prime
Minister and Social Minister Yordan Hristoskov said Monday. He
was speaking at an international conference dubbed "Economic
growth: incentives and restrictions" and organized by the
Institute for Economic Research at the Bulgarian Academy of
Sciences.

According to Hristoskov, there is no basis on which the
individual parties - be they left, right or centre - can develop
their platforms because politicians have already expended the
previous recipes of economic science.

The theoretical basis on which the right parties built their
platforms before the last elections, including reduction of
taxes and insurance contributions, greater freedom for business,
have largely been achieved in Bulgaria in recent years. Larger
tax concessions led to a warping of the economy in the direction
of investments which create temporary jobs and after that many
of these hotels, business buildings and personal properties
stand like monuments. The lower taxes which freed a resource of
some 30,000 million leva for business, led to the accumulation
of savings in banks by one part of society, without these
savings being included in economic turnover. These, according to
Hristoskov, are the reasons why well-oriented right politicians
did not use this vocabulary of stimulating the economy in the
last campaign.

Left politicians have also come to realize that words about
certain numbers of jobs cannot come true out of the blue.
"Tentative ideas about reindustrialization, understood as
reviving factories which are doomed from the point of view of
market needs, also fell through," the Social Minister added.

In Hristoskov's opinion, economic science should provide
absolutely new theories with absolutely new concepts to replace
the vocabulary of politicians with a totally new one./LI/BR