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The genus Rosa consists of more than 200 species. Among these Rosa damascena Mill belongs to the Damask group of roses which are known for their strong fragrance. R. damascena has been cultivated as garden rose in some west European collections but it is mainly grown for production of rose oil and rose water obtained after steam distillation of the rose flowers. It is considered that the oil rose originates from ancient Persia (today Iran) and has been later spread to Europe and Northern Africa. By the 14th century the Damask roses were already grown in West European rose collections as garden roses. Rose oil is mainly used in the perfumery and cosmetics industry as a base component of many of the modern perfumes but it also finds application in the food industry as a flavor additive. The main producers of rose oil are Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran and India. Smaller amounts of rose oil and mainly rose water are produced in the countries of Northern Africa. The price of the rose oil has been growing during the last years. The rose oil and rose flower extracts have been studied for a number of health-beneficial effects including antibacterial activity, antioxidant activity, anti-infective and anti-inflammatory properties, relaxant effects on tracheal chains and anti-HIV activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The partnership between universities and businesses, the transfer of research products created in higher education institutions and used in entrepreneurial practice are a source of innovation in a turbulent and highly unpredictable environment. This cooperation provides indisputable benefits not only for scientific and business organisations, but also for the economy and society as a whole. This, as expected, causes significant interest among researchers, as well as national and international institutions. Despite the scientific activity and the emphasized interest, there is a need for additional knowledge regarding the scope and extent of the use of research products created by academia, analysed and evaluated through the prism of entrepreneurs. The aim of this paper is to identify whether enterprises' size and sector affiliation influence the use of university research products in entrepreneurial practice, investigating the companies' perspective. Therefore 904 companies, operating in Bulgaria, were surveyed through a structured questionnaire. The methods for analysing the empirical data combine exploratory data analysis and confirmatory data analysis, in which the tools of diagrammatic images and contingency tables were used. The results show that as the size of enterprises increases, the use of research products does too, while at the same time, entrepreneurs' assessment of the need to establish partnerships with universities has a non-linear relation to the size of the enterprise. In addition, smaller businesses were found to be targeting university research products presented in publicly available forms while bigger ones are looking for interactive ways of knowledge transfer. Along with the size of the enterprises, it was found that their economic sector affiliation affects the intensity of cooperation with the academia highlighting as leading the sectors related to knowledgebased services, contrary to the prevailing perception that manufacturing and ITC sectors occupy leading positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impulse reaction of five economic sectors to various monetary policy shocks under the currency board regime in Bulgaria. For that purpose, we have estimated five reduced form VAR models with quarterly data over the period 2001Q1 to 2019Q4 for the sectors of agriculture, manufacturing; construction; real estate, and trade, transport and accommodation activities. The relevant impulse response functions represent three monetary transmission channels, in particular via the overnight interbank market rate, the consumer price index and the real effective exchange rate. We found that there is strong heterogeneity between sectors response to the different monetary policy shocks even under a currency board regime. The differences in the reaction are both in terms of depth, direction and duration. The monetary policy has strong positive impact on construction, and to a lesser extent on manufacturing. The response of the agriculture; trade, transport and accommodation activities is rather negative especially in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural areas are taking an important and significant share of the EU. Bulgaria is not an exception and it is important to periodically review and analyze Rural areas' progress on certain parameters, such as GDP per capita, foreign direct investments, tangible fixed assets acquisition costs, coefficient of economic activity, etc. The main goal of this article is to review the progress for a period of 5 years in the typically Rural areas in Bulgaria according to classification NUTS 3 and draw possible future goals for better regional and rural development. The research is based on the official national statistics in Bulgaria and Eurostat. After processing the data, main results are showing higher statistical values in some of the analysed parameters, like GDP and average output of nonfinancial enterprises. We can conclude that even these results are better in last few years, there is need of more stable tendency, so we can consider the typical rural areas as fast developing regions in Bulgaria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the Reimbursable Advisory Services on Accelerating Resilience to Disaster Risks, the World Bank worked with the Interior Ministry of Bulgaria to develop a proposal for the National Disaster Risk Profile of Bulgaria. The purpose of this document, which is the fourth technical annex to the proposal for the National Disaster Risk Profile, is to provide particular conclusions, information, and techniques that were utilised to evalu-ate the risk of landslides in Bulgaria. For the first time at the national level, landslide risk assessment procedures based on ISO/IEC 31010:2019 Risk assessment techniques are being developed and applied in Bulgaria. The five primary categories in which the results are presented are physical safety, economic security, social well-being, environmental security, and security of tangible assets and critical infrastructure. The uncertainty (confidence) parameter is utilised, and it is subdivided into the following three basic categories: low uncertainty, medium uncertainty, and high uncertainty. The produced results demonstrate consistent applicability to empirical data analysis and real-world situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses some key aspects related to the diversification of the economic activity of the agricultural holdings and the development of agritourism in Bulgaria and the EU as strategic approaches to address the challenges in agriculture and rural areas. Among the aspects studied are the main theoretical formulations, the general level of diversification of the economic activity of agricultural holdings and the development of agritourism as a form of diversification in Bulgaria and the EU. Taking into account the complex nature and the insufficient level of research of the phenomena under consideration, a general conceptual framework is built, the economic and social dimensions of diversification are studied, the attitudes, barriers and some perspectives for future development are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of new geopolitical tensions due to the current armed conflicts, safety in terms of navigation has been threatened due to the large number of sea mines placed, in particular, within the sea conflict areas. Additionally, since a large number of mines have recently been reported to have drifted into the territories of the Black Sea countries such as Romania, Bulgaria Georgia and Turkey, which have intense commercial and tourism activities in their coastal areas, the safety of those economic activities is threatened by possible accidents that may occur due to the above-mentioned situation. The use of deep learning in a military operation is widespread, especially for combating drones and other killer robots. Therefore, the present research addresses the detection of floating and underwater sea mines using images recorded from cameras (taken from drones, submarines, ships and boats). Due to the low number of sea mine images, the current research used both an augmentation technique and synthetic image generation (by overlapping images with different types of mines over water backgrounds), and two datasets were built (for floating mines and for underwater mines). Three deep learning models, respectively, YOLOv5, SSD and EfficientDet (YOLOv5 and SSD for floating mines and YOLOv5 and EfficientDet for underwater mines), were trained and compared. In the context of using three algorithm models, YOLO, SSD and EfficientDet, the new generated system revealed high accuracy in object recognition, namely the detection of floating and anchored mines. Moreover, tests carried out on portable computing equipment, such as Raspberry Pi, illustrated the possibility of including such an application for real-time scenarios, with the time of 2 s per frame being improved if devices use high-performance cameras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although drought is a common phenomenon in Southern Europe, including Bulgaria, it can have adverse effects on human life and economic activities (water scarcity, reduced agricultural production, and economic losses to agriculture). This event occurs regionally, but it can spread over large areas. Whether it will be perceived as a hazard depends on the affected areas and the degree of impact. The article aims to provide new insight into the meteorological drought in the most densely populated NUTS 2 region of Bulgaria--the Yugozapaden (Southwestern). Based on Standardized Precipitation Indices (SPI-1 and SPI-3), its occurrence during the period 1961--2020 was analysed in terms of duration, intensity, and magnitude. The maximum drought duration and average drought intensity were determined using SPI-1. The seasonal distribution of drought shows its higher frequency in spring and summer, but on the other side, extreme drought was more common in winter and autumn. The maximum drought duration was observed mainly in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the economic consequences in the non-financial sector of Bulgaria as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The development of the pandemic in Bulgaria is analyzed from a medical point of view and it is concluded that the country will need periodic lockdowns (restrictions by the government and health authorities) of some economic sectors for at least a few more years. The analysis of the data from Bulgaria and around the world shows that the lockdowns have general economic consequences, but mainly affect certain sectors. The main goal of the article is to identify the most vulnerable to social distancing industries in the Bulgarian economy. To this end, the article develops a methodology based on a set of criteria for assessing sectoral vulnerability to lockdowns. The methodology includes an assessment of sectoral vulnerability to automation, percentage of selfemployed in the sectors, Lockdown index, Home-office index, Teamwork, and Customer-facing. We have found that the most vulnerable sectors in Bulgaria is the Hotel and Restaurant Business sector, and Air transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]