81
REGIONAL SPECIFICITIES OF
EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT
visaged. In this context the work of the
business consultations centre in Blagoev-
grad and the business incubator in
Lovech, opened within the frameworks of
the programmes aimed at making the ser-
vices of the labour market more accessible
with the help of the Know-How Fund, have
been a promising beginning.
The establishment of clubs of special-
ists with the offices on employment in
Razlog, Razgrad and Pazardjik to provide
motivation to people with higher and sec-
ondary education to look for job or to start
independent economic activities are also
regional initiatives aimed at curtailing un-
employment. Meetings are organized be-
tween
employers and unemployed, as are
consultations for unemployed wishing to
start up their own business. The establish-
ment of a job club with the employment
office in Varna aims at encouraging the un-
employed to look for employment. Two
teams of consultants are working in Sofia
and Montana, which train persons wishing
to start their own business.
The financing
of their activity is along the lines of the
PHARE international programme. A
programme for a transition from the status
of socially weak to that of employed people
has been experimented since 1995 in
Haskovo, Vidin, Lom and Isperih.
The basic problems in the develop-
ment of the regional labour markets stem
from the financial restrictions imposed by
the centralized budgetary means, assigned
to the regions. At the same time, the local
bodies of economic management are
mostly passive and display a lack of inter-
est in independently taking up the solution
of the problems of employment and of un-
employment.
That is why the efforts over
the short, medium and long term should
be aimed at granting greater independence
to the local bodies of economic manage-
ment and at their encouragement to tackle
the labour problems on a regional scale.
6.6. Prospects of employment and
unemployment on a regional
scale
The assessment of the variants in the
development of the countrys labour mar-
kets proceeds from the continuing uncer-
tainty of economic development over the
medium and the long term. The multiple
variants of economic development can be
tentatively summarized along two lines:
According to variant A, moderately
sustainable economic development can be
provided with a further improvement of the
economic parameters, stabilization and
moderate growth. Under such a variant, the
problems of the regional labour markets
will be focused on the working out an ef-
fective application of measures, associated
with more vigorous structural and techno-
logical changes in the economy. This im-
plies the direction of the efforts to the re-
structuring of the quality parameters of the
labour force via varied programmes of edu-
cation and vocational training.
Variant B assumes a wavering eco-
nomic growth, more unstable economic
development with declines and stabiliza-
tions, more imbalanced development of the
labour market. Under such a variant, the
policy of the labour markets will preserve
its present character of combining passive
and active measures. Depending on the
period of economic cycle, the ones or the
others will have priority. This is a more
unvafourable variant for the development
of the labour resources, because it assumes
that part of them remain temporary out-
side the labour market with all the nega-
tive economic, social and personal conse-
quences proceeding therefrom.
The anticipated demographic influ-
ences on the supply of labour both over a
medium and over the longer term, show a
trend towards the declining supply of
Vagueness of the
prospects of the labour
market