Regulations governing the authority of trusts over their branches were intended to permit the establishment of flexible internal management organizations adapted to the particular needs of each trust. The trusts' policies were expected to be based on the rule that whatever the trust could do better than the branches should be centralized in it and, conversely, whatever the branches could do better than the trust should be left in their field of competence. Each trust was supposed to arrive at an optimal combination of management centralization and decentralization.
The transition to the new management system involved difficulties because of delays in issuing pertinent regulations, misinterpretation of the regulations by trust managers, and the reluctance of enterprise managers to acquiesce in the loss of their independence. Most of the organizational and personnel problems were reported to have been resolved by the end of 1971, and in March 1973 party chief Todor Zhivkov reported that further consolidation of the new management structure had been achieved. In the long run, greater efficiency of economic management is to be attained through pervasive automation of all management functions with the aid of a synchronized national network of electronic computers.
Under the new system of trusts, profits of individual branches are pooled and redistributed by the parent organization. Highly productive branches may thus find themselves in the position of having to share their profits with unproductive branches. This feature, some observers believe, may reduce incentives to raise the level of efficiency, increase output, and improve the quality of products.
National income (net national product, which excludes most services not directly related to production) was officially reported to have been 10.41 billion leva (for value of the lev--see Glossary) in 1971, compared to 10.53 billion leva in 1970. Nevertheless, the official index of national income growth showed an increase of 7 percent from 1970 to 1971. This example illustrates the difficulty of using official statistics to describe the structure and growth of the economy or structural changes over a period of time.
According to the 1971 statistical yearbook for Bulgaria, the respective shares of industry and agriculture in national income in 1970 were 49 and 22 percent. The yearbook issued in 1972, however, cited 1970 figures of 55 and 17 percent instead. According to the earlier source, the proportion of national income contributed by industry increased by 6.5 percent in the 1960-70 period, whereas the subsequent source shows a growth of 17 percent for the same period. Similarly, the contribution of agriculture to national income was reported to have declined by 36.4 and by 33.3 percent. An upward trend in the contribution of trade to national income was shown in the earlier source, but a declining trend appeared in the latter.