The index of the hidden economy in Bulgaria for 2008 has indicated a mild decrease. According to the the Centre for the Study of Democracy, statistics from conducted research reveal that the decreasing value of the grey economy can be attributed to all of the investigated factors – work load, turn over and taxation, Dnevnik daily reported on December 3 2008.

Economy Minister Petar Dimitrov claimed that the expectations of the looming economic crunch would exert additional pressure over the white, official economy, and claimed that, as a consequence, the grey and black economies might take over and “influence the ruling elite”, according to Mediapool.bg. According to the minister, competitive pressure will be intensified, unemployment will be on the rise, direct foreign investment will shrink and there will be bankruptcies among key suppliers.

However, Dimitrov claimed that the introduction of the euro as a parallel tender would be benefactory for Bulgaria, a view highly opposed by Finance Minister Plamen Oresharski, who believed that this would have a severe negative impact on Bulgaria's economy.

Measures implemented to deal with the economic crisis are reduction of the mandatory reserves of the trade banks in Bulgarian National Bank, reduction of the interest rate of BNB, the assurance of supplementary credit resource for the central bank, development worth more than 500 million leva, and improvement and facilitating a speedier financing of small and medium-sized business enterprises.

According to Oresharski, there is no current legitimate and trustworthy method by which the grey sector can be supervised and its impact calculated precisely, and the Government can only rely on approximations and inaccurate data.