Adaptation Of The Bulgarian Economy To Digital Transformation Challenges: Empirical Evaluation

The paper focuses on the challenges facing the Bulgarian economy in terms of the new model of European integration in the EU's Single Digital Market in the (post)pandemic Covid-19 realities at the macroeconomic level through an empirical study of adaptation to digital transition. The empirical evaluation proves the hypothesis that the transition to a digital economy in Bulgaria is associated with growth in GDP and an improvement in the country's human development index for the research period 2010 - 2020. Yet, there exist institutional weaknesses in the regulatory and business environment of Bulgaria, due to which the current technological divergence compared to the average levels in the EU will be expected to deepen in the next decade, which will represent an obstacle to the faster integration of Bulgaria into the Single Digital Market of the EU. This necessitates a change in the financing of investments for an accelerated sustainable digital transition of the Bulgarian economy by strengthening the levers of institutional intervention (at the national and supranational level) and over-regulation of the activities of economic entities with the resulting restrictions and risks.