The paper examines the current state and development of the Bulgarian economy in 2021 and early 2022. The main sectors of the economy (real, fiscal, foreign, and financial) are examined, and the labour market is analysed. We assess the current policies being implemented in Bulgaria, considering regional and global developments and trends. Based on specific conclusions, we make recommendations for mitigating high-risk price dynamics, preserving incomes and employment, and ensuring fiscal stability. Employing a structural macroeconomic model, a reasoned medium-run macroeconomic scenario is proposed, reflecting different assumptions about both the dynamics of the external economic environment and the expected economic policies. The analysis of the macroeconomic situation and projections for the development of the Bulgarian economy are based on key factors such as accelerating inflation, uncertainties surrounding the epidemic situation caused by COVID-19, geopolitical turbulences in the region, and the expected acceleration of investment activity through the implementation of the projects of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.

Are the root causes of the current inflationary tensions geostrategic in nature? A global perspective of the major geostrategic issues pitting the United States and its Western allies against China and Russia, for the most part, is not only necessary but unavoidable.

Is a clash of blocks now at work with the Russian invasion of Ukraine? These tensions are not only of a military nature but, above all, an economic, commercial and financial one. Monetary and budgetary responses, particularly those implemented in the United States, must be placed in this geostrategic context, as they form, by their magnitude, developments that have not been seen since the Second World War.

In this respect, the guidelines announced in August 2020 by Jerome Powell, President of the US Federal Reserve Bank, constitute a revolution in monetary policies, the importance of which was not immediately perceived: after 40 years’ fighting against inflation since Paul Volker in 1979, the FED deliberately wished for a return to inflation and acted accordingly.

One hypothesis adopted here is that the debt generated in part by the repeated trade deficits suffered by the United States in its “systemic” relations with China, especially since 2001 and its acceptance into the World Trade Organization, can only be reduced – in the minds of American leaders – by a fiscal-monetary “policy mix” which must lead to strong growth and moderate inflation just as in the years following the Second World War. The other two debt reduction options are austerity policies and default: the former have never had priority in the United States, while the latter is not possible because the US dollar must remain the world’s currency.

The paper’s contents resituate the rise of inflationary pressures on goods and services observed in 2021 and 2022 within the framework of the systemic relations (economic, commercial, financial, etc.) that have developed between the United States and China since the early 1980s. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and against the background of a “new type” of relationship between Russia and China, should the economic and financial globalization phenomena of the past 40 years be called into question?

Almost 60 years after the Yaoundé Conventions (Cameroon), the cooperation between Africa and Europe which formally started at the institutional level of the Africa-European Union in the 1950s is being renewed in 2022, under the banner of "two unions, one common vision" and around a partnership of solidarity, security, peace, economic development and sustainable prosperity. Yet, when analysing this evolution, at least two questions need to be asked: what are the chances that this time the partnership between Africans and Europeans will be more like a "win-win" partnership? What are the unexplored possibilities for optimising cooperation and achieving mutually beneficial common goals? In this paper, we explore different aspects of economic relations, but especially trade relations, in an attempt to offer a new perspective for the development of cooperation between Africa and Europe. Methodologically, our approach encompasses a historical survey of trade in goods during the period of 2002–2021, albeit in the context of a contemporary understanding of both challenges and opportunities for the development of this Euro-African partnership.

The report uses a methodological approach founded by Jevons and Chizhevskij. The years of solar cycles have been numbered according to the order established in the astrophysics of the un, then grouped and compared with the arithmetic averages of effective rates for US federal funds. Grouping statistical data by serial numbers of years of solar activity cycles has made it possible to construct a function of effective rates on federal funds (dependent variable) and serial numbers of years of the average solar activity cycle (independent variable) with correlation coefficients on its four segments close to 1 (0.99499269, -0.998464195, 0.986985363, -0.996221106). This function enables predicting the values of the effective interest rate on US federal funds in subsequent years. It follows that in 2023 this rate will increase to 1.996%.

More than 40 years after the economies of the post-socialist countries took the path of the market, we are still asking ourselves what we have actually created. The new book by Nikolai Nenovsky and Eric Manian helps us with the answers by exploring the specific forms that capitalism has taken in the post-socialist countries and in the Balkans in particular. Forms defined by the authors as Dependent Capitalism (DC), established in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) at the beginning of the current century, which are the result of a complex combination between the initial conditions of the late 1980s, the legacy of the former socialist system and the processes of transition and EU integration marked by institutional reform. The book focuses in particular on Dependent Monetary Regimes (DMRs) and exclusively on the specific forms these regimes have taken in the Balkans. It examines the introduction and functioning of currency boards in Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the euro as legal tender in Montenegro and Kosovo.