ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL OF NORTHWEST AND NORTH CENTRAL REGION IN BULGARIA

The establishment of trends and intensity of ongoing processes is important for revealing the causes and differences in the development of regions, the disproportions that have arisen and the need to apply adequate measures for their reduction and limitation. In today's economy, undergoing increasing transformations towards sustainability in each of the developing sectors in Bulgaria and especially in the sensitive regions, sustainability in the context of sustainable development is becoming even more important. Two of the poorest regions in EU are located in Bulgaria – the Northwest and the North Central Region (NWR and NCR), and this is the main reason to analyse the indicators characterizing their economic, social, demographic and environmental condition in this article. The main objective of the study is to analyse important indicators for two of the statistical regions in Bulgaria (NWR and NCR) related to the current vision for their economic, socio-demographic and environmental condition. The study found that, unfortunately, the negative trend of the NWR and the NCR being the least populated regions in the Republic of Bulgaria is still growing, where the population in the NWR manages to stay within the upper limit, while the NCR is emerging as the region with the fastest depopulation. Enterprises with high risk potential have a larger relative share in the NCR, and those in the NWR have lower values. The higher relative share of enterprises with low risk potential in the NWR indicates the possibility of increasing sustainable territorial development and connectivity between different territories, between urban and rural areas. A sustainable trend is observed towards reducing the carbon dioxide values in the sectors of construction, energy, industry and waste. The same trend is noted for methane in the sectors of agriculture, construction, transport and waste, and for the nitrous oxide component in the agriculture, construction and energy sectors. Alarming is the trend in both studied regions for increasing values of CO2 in the agriculture and transport sectors, and of methane in the energy and industry sectors.