[ad_1]
In 1989, a kilo of a meat delicacy cost BGN 16 compared to BGN 240. average salary. Now it is twice as expensive, but with a salary five times higher.
The famous socialist ruler Pencho Kubadinski visited the meatpacking plant in the 1960s, where the famous Smyadovo sausage is produced for a long time. He arrives at the sausage workshop itself, where an adult craftsman works. Try a piece and comment, “It’s beautiful, but at the time it seemed better.”
To which the old man replied: “No, Comrade Kubadinski, it is the same. I have been working here for 35 years and the recipe has not changed.” But before you were young and poor, you enjoyed it more and that is why it seems to you that it was tastier then ”, he replied.
This is a true story, but even if it is made up, it shows very clearly how a person picks up on the trend over time.
remember
especially the good things
what happend to him. The brain itself burying everything negative deeply, and when a person turns 60 or 70, it begins to seem that in his youth everything was good, cheap, tasty, that life was easy and quiet, that there was not so much crime and that people she was more polite and more humane. And that he had to queue at least two or three lines after work to secure dinner at home, somehow he forgot.
Today, for example, a 60-year-old man sincerely believes that in 1984, with his starting salary of BGN 125 per month, he managed to live better than now at BGN 1,250. But he conveniently forgets that he was only 24 then and was
still lived
with their parents
In other words, he did not take care of his food or his living expenses, so these 125 levs were only for his pocket money and, of course, he felt rich.
Another recalls that in the past he flew by helicopter from Sofia to Kardzhali, and his parents drove his family’s car all over Bulgaria every summer. But she didn’t know her parents were waiting
11 years,
to buy this car, and that they signed up to buy it before he was born.
When it comes to prices, wages, and inflation, things get even more complicated and confusing. Statistics in Bulgaria have a history of 130 years, but during socialism inflation in our country was not called inflation, but a “general price index”. At the same time, it was not measured as current inflation by interviewers circulating in stores, but by calculation, as a proportion of the turnover between two consecutive years. So the supporters of socialism rightly claim that there was no inflation then, because nobody measured it, and this word was not very popular.
Subsequently, the prices were set by the General Directorate of Prices and were mandatory.
the same throughout the country
And the last price of socialist Bulgaria, Dimitar Grivekov, had more power over the economy than the prime minister. Woe to a company that cannot adjust to the prices it sets! That is why many of them sought to work for export and not for the domestic market, which was one of the many reasons for the chronic shortage of basic needs at the time.
Once every 3-4 years, mainly due to external factors, it was necessary to do something that the managers of then called “price adjustment”: certain goods became more expensive.
Today, for example, many do not remember the exact price of bread, because in 1979 and 1985.
the country falls in
difficulties for service
your foreign debt
and prices must be “adjusted.” Thus, after many years of bread “Dobrudzha” cost 28 cents, and white “Stara Zagora” – 36 cents per kilogram, in 1979 these prices rose 2 cents, and in 1985 the weight decreased to 800 grams at the same price.
In 1985, for example, a call from a street phone went up in price from 2 to 5 stotinki (today we would say “150%”), forcing the coin acceptor of all devices to be changed. That is why this “price adjustment” is remembered.
But few remember that the then-mass gasoline A-86 rose in price in 1985 from 70 to 90 cents a liter.
By comparison, in 1985 the average monthly salary was BGN 213.7 and the average pension was BGN 90.80. cooperative farmers received a monthly pension of BGN 30.
Another great confusion arises when it comes to comparing prices and wages for the last 30 years. During this time, thousands of percent of inflation has accumulated in Bulgaria, and we had a period of hyperinflation in 1996, which economists rank as the 21st highest inflation in the world for this century. We also go through a denomination of money and today many things are so blurred that it is very difficult to compare when we lived better, 30 years ago or now.
Economists often do this by tracking the family budgets we have.
are carried out
without interruption of
1962 to the present
These surveys take the average household income for a year and calculate how much of a certain type that household could buy with that money in the same year. In this comparison, many interesting things come to light for Bulgaria.
In 1989, for example, with its annual income, a household could buy 245 pairs of children’s shoes. Today you can buy 207 pairs. The same goes for bread – in 1989 we could buy 4614 white breads, and today – 4155, that is. little by little. The same goes for milk.
The common denominator of all these products is one: at that time
their production
has been subsidized
from the country
in the form of state aid.
But for everything else, the comparison is unequivocally in favor of now.
With the annual income we could buy 429 kilograms of pork in 1989 and now 819 kg. We could have bought 278 kg of durable hot dogs and now 425 kg.
Then we could buy 3 televisions with the annual income of a household, and now, up to 12. That is. Wooden TVs with wooden boxes and CRTs were more of a luxury than the current flat-panel receiver, which can also be used for a projector, computer monitor, and a thousand other things.
However, the truth is that statistics refer to averages. If a person’s legs are in a burning oven and their head is in the refrigerator compartment, according to statistics, their body temperature will be normal.
On the other hand, the statistics do other research, which shows that during the last 30 years
inequality
in society
has increased
pretty strong
It is not a question of comparing socialism with the present, because in the past nobody studied inequality except for scientific purposes.
The first official data from the INE on income inequality date from 1992. From then until 2009, the so-called Gini coefficient in our country was around 30%. This is the depth of the deviation from the equality line. At the time, this looked great against data for the same indicator in many other European countries, which was showing around 35%.
However, when this study was harmonized with the European one, this indicator increased and reached values of 35.9%. This result is again comparable with data from other European countries and does not put us in a much worse position than them.
Then for two years, it was 33%. Starting in 2015, however, it started to grow again: it was 37% in 2015, it increased to 37.7% the following year, and in 2017 it even reached 40.2%, then fell to 39.6%. . By 2019, when the latest data is available, it has been converted back to 40%, which places Bulgaria in the highest segment of income inequality among members of the European Union.
But if we go back to the sausage, there is no drama. In 1989, a kilo of sausage cost BGN 16,
when one had
lucky to find her
in the shop
With an average salary of around BGN 240.
Now sausage is twice as expensive, around BGN 32 per kilo, unless you have enough free time to look for promotions where the price drops to around BGN 24-26. But wages are not twice as high since then and five times the current average. It is approximately BGN 1350.
[ad_2]
