Bulgaria’s investment to GDP ratio dropped more than nine percentage points in 10 years
The ratio of investment to GDP in Bulgaria dropped by 9.1 percentage points between 2007 and 2017, according to figures released on May 14 by European Union statistics agency Eurostat.
Bulgaria was one of 24 out of 28 EU countries to see this trend.
In Bulgaria, the ratio was 28.3 per cent in 2007, falling to 19.2 per cent in 2017.
Over this decade, the largest declines were observed in Latvia (19.9 per cent in 2017 vs.36.4 per cent in 2007, or -16.5 pp), Greece (-13.4 pp), Estonia (-12.9 pp), Romania (-12.5 pp), Spain (-10.4 pp), Slovenia (-10.3 pp), Lithuania (-9.8 pp) and Bulgaria (-9.1 pp).
In contrast, the ratio slightly rose between 2007 and 2017 in Sweden (from 23.9 per cent of GDP in 2007 to 24.9 per cent in 2017, or +1.0 pp), Austria (+0.6 pp) and Germany (+0.2 pp), while it remained almost stable in Belgium (+0.1 pp).
In 2017, total investment (both from the public and the private sectors) by EU member states amounted to almost 3 100 billion euro. Construction accounted for about half of these investments, with machinery, equipment & weapons systems (31 per cent) and intellectual property products (19 per cent) following. The intellectual property products category has shown the largest increase in investment in proportion to total capital investment.
Overall, total investment was equivalent to 20.1 per cent of GDP in 2017, compared with 22.4 per cent 10 years ago, just before the economic and financial crisis. This represents a decrease of 2.3 percentage points (pp). The fall in investment is even more pronounced in the euro area: from 23.2 per cent in 2007 to 20.5 per cent in 2017 (-2.7 pp).
Among the EU member states, in 2017 investment accounted for a quarter of GDP in the Czech Republic (25.2 per cent) and Sweden (24.9 per cent). Estonia (23.7 per cent), Austria (23.5 per cent), Ireland (23.4 per cent), Belgium (23.3 per cent), Romania and Finland (both 22.6 per cent) as well as France (22.4 per cent) all had investment rates of over 20 per cent of GDP.
At the opposite end of the scale, the lowest ratio of investment to GDP was recorded by Greece (12.6 per cent), followed by Portugal (16.2 per cent), the United Kingdom (16.9 per cent), Luxembourg (17.0 per cent), Italy (17.5 per cent) and Poland (17.7 per cent).
(Photo: Clive Leviev-Sawyer)
