The Social Progress of the Districts of Bulgaria

Abstract

The development of societies today is inequal, and the modern approach to deal with this situation is through the idea of inclusive development. Its descriptive definition emphasises the problems of inequality, poverty, growth, employment, development and social welfare, as well as the search for instruments to measure this state in order not to be a ‘mirage’. The existing approaches rely on indices to evaluate the degree of inclusion, as most of them compare economic with social and ecological results. The report aims to address the problem of measuring the inclusive development of districts in Bulgaria through the evaluation of an index of social progress. The tasks include the establishment of suitable indicators to include in the index, an evaluation of the district development in accordance with the selected indicators, ranking the districts, and evaluating inclusiveness towards the average results of the state. The results show that the districts develop socially heterogeneously and not inclusively, since not all of them demonstrate the successful satisfaction of the basic social needs of citizens, which hamper their ability to reach their full potential.