Issue 1, 2021

Along with the dynamic transformations associated with the failure of multilateralism, changes in global demand patterns, the return to protectionism and the integration of emerging economies into global markets, global trade is undergoing dynamic changes related to the search for greater economic efficiency through the use of global value chains. These trends have an impact on both trade and production specialization, and the demand for different types of skills, thus enabling greater profits, but also posing new challenges for trade policy. The main trends in trade and specialization and the development of global value chains are traced, then the changing nature of international specialization and the relationship between trade policy, trade and specialization are analyzed. Lastly, an assessment of the future development of global trade and global value chains is presented and several scenarios for trade and specialization by 2060 are summarized.
JEL: F10; F13; F60

2020 marked the 100th anniversary of the personal income tax in Bulgaria. At the beginning of the XX century, this tax was already in vogue in many countries of the developed world (Western Europe, USA, etc.). Johannes Popitz (1884-1945), professor of tax law and finance minister of Prussia (1933-1944), "crowned" the personal income tax as the “queen of taxes”. The present article is devoted to the genesis and development of the personal income tax in our country (the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the People's Republic of Bulgaria and the Republic of Bulgaria).
JEL: H24

The article provides an empirical assessment of Wagner's Law for Bulgaria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Belgium, Austria, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Luxembourg, Finland, Iceland and Norway. The relationship between the growth rates of GDP per capita and government expenditures for the period from the first quarter of 1999 to the second quarter of 2017 was modeled using the autoregressive ARDL method and the Bounds test. According to the results obtained, Wagner's law was confirmed for Bulgaria and Spain, while it did not find support for the other countries. This is further confirmed by the attached Granger causality test.
JEL: E62; H41; H50

This paper is an attempt at empirically studying the link between environmental deterioration, economic growth and trade openness in China. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is augmented as a theoretical framework for the study and an Autoregressive Distributed Lag bounds testing approach is applied to test whether China exhibits similar behaviour. With the objective of documenting the impact of economic growth and international trade on the emission of carbon dioxide in China, the traditional income-emissions model is applied with variables such as the GDP per capita, the squared value of the GDP per capita, and trade openness for annual data for the period 1971-2014. The findings of the study show that CO2 emissions in China are highly elastic in terms of their connection to the income levels, and that the income driven growth beyond a certain level makes society cleaner and less polluted. Furthermore, it is also found that, in the long run, the trade-driven growth causes more environmental degradation. The evidence available from this empirical exercise validates the EKC hypothesis for China in the long run. The results have significant policy implications. The policy makers in China should consider emphasising or continuing to promote those policy measures which will make it possible to reduce the emissions from trade induced economic growth.
JEL: Q56; C02