The Great Depression in the eyes of Bulgaria's inter-war economists

The current paper is an attempt to reconstruct the economic policy debates in Bulgaria around the Great Depression in the 1930s. The goal is twofold. First, it is of interest to track down the development of Bulgarian economic thought in the inter-war period and to analyse its intellectual relationships to the evolution of European (especially German-language) political economy. Secondly, due to some significant analogies between the situation in the surveyed period and the current crisis, it seems possible to tentatively draw conclusions from the economists’ debates then as a contribution to crisis management and post-crisis development of Bulgaria today. The paper is only secondarily interested in the quantitative economic history of the 1930s; instead, the primary objective is to show that history of economic thought as a discipline can give qualitative indications how past theoretical discourse can be inspiring both for conducting economic policy and for avoiding past mistakes.