Bulgaria's state budget should back more balanced growth, with steady consumption, more investment and exports, and higher-value production. That's the call made in an opinion titled "European Semester 2026: challenges and priorities for Bulgaria," adopted at a plenary session of the Economic and Social Council, the advisory body's press office said.
The council says the fix to public finances needs to happen on time, but what matters most is how the plan to cut the deficit is built. Ministers should only decide on the mix of tax hikes and spending cuts after weighing what each move would do to the economy, to people and to how income is shared out.
The council says it is seriously worried about the worsening state of the budget. Bulgaria must fix its excessive deficit by 2029. The council says this should happen through lasting structural changes and by checking how well money is actually spent. Investment that's proven to drive growth should be left alone.
"Fixing the budget balance must not slow economic growth by cutting capital spending or money for education, research and development, or health prevention — all of which are proven to boost growth and public wellbeing," the opinion says.
The council points to growth, high employment and low unemployment as a good starting point, but says these don't remove the barriers holding back Bulgaria's catch-up growth. It lists the obstacles as "low productivity, too little private investment and innovation, a shrinking population, a skills gap and big regional differences."
The council wants Bulgaria's specific recommendations built into the medium-term fiscal-structural plan, into budget planning, into structural reforms and into next year's progress report. It suggests picking a small number of priority steps with results that can be measured, then tracking them through the monitoring and reporting systems already in place.
The same meeting also approved an analysis of how youth policies affect society and the economy. It covers how youth policy is run and funded, the effect of youth employment schemes, and how to better include young people. More than 100,000 young people in Bulgaria are neither working, nor studying, nor in training.
The council says the main problem is that no one collects data systematically or tracks results, so it wants better monitoring and impact checks. It says youth centres, youth organisations and youth workers can do a lot to reach vulnerable groups.
On Tuesday, the council held a forum on making social support more effective. It's part of a task the Council of Ministers gave the council: to hold a public debate on the challenges and risks of rewriting social support law into a single code. The debate must also look at how that rewrite would affect the adequacy of social payments.