Vamos a la Playa vs. Standing at the Gates: Beaches in Bulgaria

ABSTRACT

Beaches at the Bulgarian Black Sea coast were public and club goods until the mid-1990s. By that time the Bulgarian government had granted private investors temporary property rights by providing concessions. Consequently, more beaches show characteristics of club goods nowadays. On a national level, the process can be considered as a reallocation of public resources, thus affecting the well-being of many. This paper focuses on three aspects of this process and contributes to the ongoing discussion of how to handle public resources by addressing the case of beaches in Bulgaria. We first describe the process as observed for beaches in order to provide an analytical basis for further research. Stakeholders and their interests are then identified. The paper proceeds by pointing at conflicts between the different types of shareholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Common pool resource
• club good
• beach
• beach management
• licensing
• Bulgaria

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• P26
• R14
• R38
• Z32

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on earlier drafts, we thank Anton Gerunov, Martin Hoffstadt, Teodor Sedlarski and anonymous reviewers of this journal. We would particularly like to thank Yulian Konstantinov who made us aware of structures in tourism prevailing in Socialist Bulgaria. For research assistance, we thank Konstantin Kleemann. An early version of this text was published under the same title as a working paper in Bulgarian Economic Papers (BEP 08–2016). The present text is in some parts substantially different from the working paper. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Song title by the band Righeira in 1983 and song title by Garry Rafferty in 1982.

2. The story of Oregon’s “Beach Bill” and the controversy of the various interested parties is captured in a 2009 documentary by Tom Olsen, Jr. (cf. Olsen, 2009).

3. See also the more recent discussions in the field of economic analysis of law and legal norms (Posner, 2014).

4. As of March 2016 the concessions are issued by the Ministry of Tourism. The allocation mechanism, however, remains unchanged, as described above.