РАННИ ВЪЗДЕЙСТВИЯ НА COVID ВЪРХУ КОНСОЛИДИРАНИЯ ДЪРЖАВЕН БЮДЖЕТ .

Aim of the study. The present study analyzes the initial impact of the Covid pandemic on the revenue and expenditure side of the consolidated government budget of Bulgaria. Materials and methods. The impact on the following budget variables is studied - tax and social insurance revenues, social expenditure, subsidies for non-financial enterprises and for health and medical activities. The choice of the variables is made on the basis of a study of the changes in the annual law on the government budget for 2020. Results. Three dynamic rows of the indicated variables are constructed, which consist the monthly values from the reports on budget execution for the period January 2018 – February 2021. At the next stage, the OLS estimates of the trend functions are obtained. The strength of the pandemic's impact on changes in time series was established using the Chow test for significant differences between the regression coefficients of the trend functions in the subperiods - until March 2020 and beyond. It is found a significant difference between the subperiods in the social expenditure (the main part of them are the social insurance payments, including for the health system) – Chow test > F (2;34) in condition of 5 % significance level. Subsidies and tax and social insurance revenues’ time series in subperiods have a large change in the regression coefficients due to the pandemic, but their test statistics remain below the critical value. Conclusions. The conclusion is that the Covid pandemic strongly affects the revenue and expenditure part of the government budget, which is reflected in the change of the budget balance from balanced to deficit, causing an increase in the debt burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]