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We have worked in many countries. We have worked with the World Bank. We have worked a lot in Latin America and in South East Asia. And I also worked a lot in the Middle East with that foundation. We worked in other countries and we chose to do first an assessment and we tried to understand the level of informality in each country and then, the level of willingness of the country to change, because as I said, 70% of the population of the world lives in an informal environment. The willingness and the appetite to change and reform – it is a very different story. So, we had to make that assessment – what is the difference, what is the commitment of the country to change? And the third one was the level of difficulty.

So, we chose to start with Bulgaria because it has all three aspects. It has, of course, informality. But it is a new country where after transformation, after the resolution of the communist party there was this transitional structure that brought the country into a market economy. That is a benefit and an advantage because that meant that the level of difficulty of handling the problems in Bulgaria is not going to be as high as handling problems, let’s say, in Lebanon or in Egypt, because these countries have been working in the market economy for far, far more time. So, to unlock and destruct these problems would take longer time.

The second element was that there was a very serious commitment from the government to do the reforms. It is not necessarily the specific government I am talking about as much as the civil servants, the consistency of the governance. It is a serious country and it seems that they are very eager, they have the appetite of wanting to become better, stronger, robust, serious players. And that is very important, because there is no way one person, or even a very important one person, or a very important one company to finally do a reform which is so deep-rooted in the core element of the individual if that individual and that society is not elevated and is not evolved enough to want to have it. And that was a key element.

We made a tour of municipalities and wanted to also find that same spark of change in these municipalities. Of course, the resources are limited, so we started with one municipality. We had to find an important city but not important historically, or an important city geographically. So, we decided to work with Dupnitsa because to me, after my experience, after having worked in 30 countries, the commitment of the people was tremendous. They work faster than we do, they run faster than we do and there is nothing more beautiful than to work in an environment with your partner which is far more engaged than you have ever thought. I know there are controversies about this city. It does not bother me to the least because I always learn myself and my team that who we always serve are the people of whatever municipality or country we work for. The leaders come and go. They are important to set the terms but we serve the people. These are their private properties we are securing. It is not the properties of somebody else. So, they are going to be better off. They are already better off, because we have already started working and I would be delighted to come back and have a meeting with you in ten months or so and see it before and after. As a matter of fact, we are just starting to do an econometrics study and we will be able to quantify the social benefit of the reform before and after and the economic benefit of each individual owner before and after.

What does the reality check analysis say about the informality in Dupnitsa?

It is very similar to what happens in Greece. Bulgaria is a country that really initiated its modern democracy a little later than Greece. But it is also important that it imported it like the Greeks did. They imported it together with the legal tradition of the German Republic but it has minorities, before that it was the Ottoman Empire, before that there were influences from the Byzantine Empire, before that there were the Slavs. So, reality check analysis has to go all the way back to the beginning and to see why did this happen to that population and it decided to go this way versus continue to develop with the formal structure. It is an extremely interesting case, because it had these legal traditions it became rather reject and a little bureaucratic in terms of transferring property but not as bureaucratic as other countries. So, it is easier to resolve it here. Why not as bureaucratic? It is because the communist period was actually not a very negative period in that regard. What do I mean by that? There were not very many transactions for seventy years. So, right now it is easier to clean this. The problem starts from the day of restitutions. So, the day you started having restitutions that is when you start having “black” markets operating. Because of the informality people are designing their properties in whichever way and forms they felt it is easier for them.

We are basically working with the framework of the reforms that have already been established since 1994 and later on ratified in 2003 or 2004. And we just basically apply those by putting them down to the people. But the way we do it starts from the people and we try to get the people’s involvement. There is no other way to get back because it is super important to have confidence. And the database we built, the registry we are building is a database of the municipality. It is a public database and people will take care of it. They are already taking care of it and I would be delighted to see how it is going to work out. And I am very positive that it is going to work out rather nicely.