Bulgaria no longer enjoys one of its traditional advantages of other nations: the cheap and highly qualified labour

Bulgaria no longer enjoys one of its traditional advantages of other nations: the cheap and highly qualified labour, according to Economy and Energy Minister Roumen Ovcharov.

Speaking Wednesday at an open session of the National Innovations Council, he said that this country already experiences a shortage of engineers. Within the EU the shortage of such specialists is about 500,000 people, whereas expressed as percentage in Bulgaria this shortage would be even greater, said Ovcharov.

One way to reverse this trend is to achieve better cooperation between establishments of higher education and the business, Ovcharov said.

About 18,000 students have left Bulgaria to study in Europe or the United States and it is unclear how many Bulgarian teachers have emigrated, Professor Hans Wissema of the Delft Technical University in The Netherlands, who was a guest at the open session of the Innovations Council, said. He added that part of the economic growth of a nation and of the successful performance of a given company is the creation of the so-called technostarters, i.e. new high-tech enterprises to a given university. Wissema said that one good example of this in Bulgaria is a company called Daisy, set up by the Institute of Microelectronics and the Technical University in Sofia, which connected Sofia’s taxi cabs to a GPS system.

BTA