The Great Depression in the Eyes of Bulgaria's Inter-War Economists

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the economic policy debates in Bulgaria during the Great Depression. The goal is twofold. First, it depicts the development of Bulgarian economic thought in the inter-war period and analyzes its intellectual relationships to the evolution of European (especially German-language) political economy. Second, due to significant analogies between the processes during the Great Depression and during the Great Recession, it tentatively derives recommendations from the economists' debates in the 1930s for handling the current crisis and for the post-crisis development of today's Bulgaria. The quantitative economic history of the 1930s is only of secondary interest to the paper: instead, its primary objective is to show in what ways history of economics as a discipline with its focus on past theoretical discourses can be inspiring for conducting economic policy today, so that hindsight on earlier economic thought in the context of its time presents both recommendations and warnings for crisis management today.