The impact of the global economic crisis on the HR policies of the small and medium sized enterprises in Bulgaria

Introduction

The current global crisis originated in the US financial system. Since it is the center of a net-work that interlinks national financial systems of almost all countries in the world, the crisis spread out very quickly. The fall in asset prices, the liquidity contraction and the increased un-certainty in financial markets gradually started to affect not only economic activity, but also connected spheres. According to the databases the world companies would experience in 2009 the biggest contraction in the last 60 years.

Within our work we are interested in the resulting contraction in aggregate demand spread out all over the world through international HR-policies. A key insight is that HR-policies behavior does not necessarily replicate in the same way in all countries. This work focuses on two important differences between developed and developing countries regarding financial crises.

HR-policy is a key context for the study of social determinants of people working: broadly stated, HR — policies are the conditions in which people live and work, and that affect their opportunities to lead healthy and wealthy lives. In the first three part series, we described the origins of the series in work conducted for the Globalization Knowledge Network (GKN) on Social Determinants of Health and in the Commission’s specific concern with health equity. We identified and defended a definition of HR-policies that gives primacy to the drivers and effects of transnational economic integration, and addressed a number of important conceptual and methodological issues in studying globalization’s effects on SDH and their distribution, emphasizing the need for transdisciplinary approaches that reflect the complexity of the topic.

The global financial crisis, brewing for a while, really started to show its effects in the middle of 2007 and into 2008. Around the world stock markets have fallen, large financial institutions have collapsed or been bought out, and governments in even the wealthiest nations have had to come up with rescue packages to bail out their financial systems.

On the one hand many people are concerned that those responsible for the financial problems are the ones being bailed out, while on the other hand, a global financial meltdown will affect the livelihoods of almost everyone in an increasingly inter-connected world. The problem could have been avoided, if ideologues supporting the current economics models weren’t so vocal, influential and inconsiderate of others' viewpoints and concerns.

Within our dissertation work we conducted a survey of over 500 HR and business leaders in more than 30 countries worldwide to explore how HR priorities and challenges have changed during the global economic downturn. Hudson’s study indicates that during this current economic crisis, the focus is not only on cost cutting through right-sizing, but also on talent engagement, talent development, and the retention of talent key to the organization’s success.

Part 1. The Post-crisis challenges in global division of labor 2009

1.1. Literature reviewed

The analysis of the Bulgarian research system has shown that it has stagnated in recent years following a prolonged period of downsizing, facing a lot of restructuring challenges, as well as very low investment in R&D in the 1990s. Bulgaria faces most of the challenges described in the Green Paper «The European Research Area: New Perspectives». The country’s EU accession has promoted the process of setting up modern governance institutions though often their existence remains mostly «on paper» with little effect on R&D policy implementation. A particularly persistent weakness of the Bulgarian R&D system re-mains the very low participation of the private sector in R&D expenditures. Bulgaria faces challenges in all four domains presented in this report, including in the coordination and coherence between them, but low R&D expenditures coupled with the increasing deficit of qualified R&D personnel are probably the biggest and hardest of them.

In our research we have tried to look at this sphere and to identify some of those policies, developments or events that have had an impact on culture. While trying to assess the current situation and developments, we have tried to look at possible future scenarios for EU involvement in the field of culture. One of my main assumptions was that in the future, the regulation of cultural markets will be one of the key, if not the most important, element of cultural policies. We wanted to find out how Europe has been responding to trends of commodification in all aspects of culture in order to see if the EU’s often publicly declared priority of promoting cultural diversity and `unity in diversity' was really accompanied by the most effective policy instruments. Has Europe found a way to integrate adequately both cultural and economic aspects of cultural goods and services in its policies?

In the 90s the country underwent fundamental socio-economic changes, related to the transition to a market economy and adaptation to the requirements of the European and world markets. The new economic orientation towards the EU imposed different standards for the competitive capacities and the survival of the national industries.

During that period, Bulgaria passed through different economic crises and the individual regions manifested different paces of transformation. It is necessary to assess the driving forces in the processes of regional development and the new factors that produce regional differences.

Bulgaria confronts the necessity of searching for a compromise between the classical objectives of regional policy and economic and social cohesion policy for reducing inter-regional disparities and attaining rapid and sustainable economic growth in order to ensure convergence with the EU member-states and regions. This has been caused by the fact that not only the losing regions, but also winning regions are lagging behind according to European standards.