Impact of Local Factors for Changes on Labor and Farm Number in Bulgaria

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of local factors for changes in labor force and farm number in Bulgaria based on the last two censuses conducted in the years 2010 and 2020. The local factors are considered those conditions and prepositions apart from the national and regional causes driving the development and tendencies in the farm structure. The local level in this study is municipality territory, which is adopted as an unit for defining rural and not-rural areas. The evolution of labor worked in Bulgarian agriculture and the number of farms is steadily declining between both censuses, which is a general finding, where is interesting to identify the local differences and particularities. For the sake to analyze the local specifics, the Territorial Shift Share Analysis (TSSA) is applied. The TSSA is an analytical tool built on the basis of Shift Share Analysis (SSA), designed to determine the contribution of local determinants to the changes in the number of agricultural farms and labor force having in mind and estimating the changes driven by national and regional causes. The results show that about 72% of the observed changes ascertained as a decrease in farms in the country can be prescribed to macroeconomic, national influencing causes, about 19% has more regional roots and only about 9% of the decrease in the number of farms can be connected to local characteristics and factors. In the case of the labor force, the structure of the factor influence is similar, as around 69% of the total change in the labor force can be pertained to macroeconomic reasons, 21% can be traced to regional conditions and 10% to local circumstances. This structure is very similar and shows that local factors also contribute to the reduction in the number of farms and the labor force in the Bulgarian agriculture, which means that there is almost no local initiative for complement support of this production. The regional factors also have a certain impact, even though more limited than the macroeconomic and national environment, as it is deemed that as much as the regions differ from each other, the greater is the weight and impact of the regional level to the estimated changes. Keywords: agriculture, changes, labor, farms, Bulgaria JEL: J01; Q1; R11