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Vladimir Damyanov
OPTIMIZING FIRE SAFETY IN BULGARIA THROUGH INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES
Summary:
The article focuses on the main points in defining the hypothesis of optimizing fire safety in Bulgaria through Internet technologies as a possible and adequate strategy for the successful development of fire safety and civil protection authorities. The topic represents a distinct view on organizational change – from conservative behaviour to e-governance.
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Hrabrin Bashev
AN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING AND ASSESSING THE GOVERNANCE EFFICIENCY OF AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISES
Summary:
This article incorporates the New Institutional Economy and proposes an approach for understanding and assessing the governance efficiency of farms. It corroborates that a farm is efficient if it manages all its transactions and activities in the most economical (equal or more efficient) way compared to any other organization. Moreover, farms must have a good potential to adapt to permanently changing market, institutional, technological and natural environments in order to have high (overall) governance efficiency. Nature of the problems in effective organization for the main farm transactions for securing needed factors of production and output realization is used as an indicator for farm’s comparative efficiency. The analysis of survey data found that the overall level of governance efficiency of Bulgarian farms is acceptable the efficiency of 60% of them is low. There are huge differences in the level of efficiency of farms of different legal form, size, specialization and location as well as in the share of farms with different levels of efficiency in each group.
Keywords: governance, efficiency, farm, transaction costs.
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Rumen Vyrbanov
THE USE OF THE INTERNET TO SUPPORT AND DEVELOP DEMOCRACY
Summary:
The realization of the idea of e-democracy is an important part of the information society, the establishment of which is a priority for the EU. The article analyses some of the aspects of e-democracy and their importance for strengthening democracy, democratic institutions and democratic processes.
Its primary objective is to determine the conditions for implementing of the idea of e-democracy in Bulgaria by defining the key problems related to e-democracy and the causes thereof.
A large amount of data was subjected to comparative analysis to determine the current status of the information society, e-government and e-ser-vices in Bulgaria and in other European Union countries.
The author has put emphasis on the essential role of social media in the process of implementation of various forms of electronic democracy.
The author's main thesis is that information and communication tech-nologies (ICT) are a prerequisite and a very important factor for the develop-ment of e-democracy. However, the use of the Internet in various forms of democratic life depends heavily on the degree of the e-readiness of the country, its efficient e-government and e-services, the sustained interest of its citizens in participating in its governance and their requirements for transparency and free access to information, its government and civil organizations, the adequacy of its legislation, the level of development of its civil society and its drive for continuous strengthening and development of democratic institu-tions.
