Dimitar Stoyanov to Kiril Petkov: I hope he knows that pregnancy in women lasts a little less than 9 months

The adviser to the president on security and defense, Dimitar Stoyanov, published an interesting post dedicated to the PP congress and, in particular, to Kiril Petkov's speech.

On Facebook he wrote:

This weekend, at their congress, the PP boasted that the birth rate in Bulgaria has risen because of them. A statement that was immediately refuted, given the fact that the absolute number of children born in Bulgaria has been steadily decreasing since 2009.

Today, Kiril Petkov personally came out with a schedule at hand to explain this unexpected exit from the demographic crisis.

What has been understood is that Petkov is not talking about the absolute number of children born in our country, but about the so-called "total fertility rate". Since I am not a statistician, I had to open the website of the National Statistical Institute (NSI) and familiarize myself with the description of this coefficient.

Namely, that it is "the sum of the older fertility coefficients in the relevant year. It shows the average number of children (boys and girls) that a woman would give birth to during her entire fertile period (from 15 to 49 years) according to the older fertility in the reporting year.

I am sure that Kiril Petkov has a thorough understanding of the coefficient he quotes.

As we mentioned NSI, there is no data for 2023 on their website. The latest information about this coefficient is for 2022. Probably data for this year is also cited by Petkov.

Petkov told journalists that this demographic miracle was due to four factors – free kindergartens, more security for people, a big increase in the minimum wage and raising incomes, in general.

Now, some biology – as we all know, and I hope Mr. Petkov knows, pregnancy in women lasts a little less than 9 months. Or to make it more understandable, the children born in 2022 were conceived between the beginning of April 2021 and the beginning of April 2022.

Petkov said that the demographic miracle was due to free kindergartens. Except that this measure entered into force on April 1, 2022. Therefore, it was not the idea of either PP or DB, even less of Kiril Petkov.

Things with the minimum wage (raised from BGN 650 to BGN 710) remain the same – pick-up is from April 1, 2022

To summarize – Kiril Petkov boasts of an increased birth rate for 2022. Indeed, according to NSI data, "total fertility rate" then it is 1.78 and for 2021 it is 1.58.

Does the office "Denkov" have credit for better 2022 demographics? The question is rhetorical. Have the measures mentioned by Kiril Petkov had an effect on the demographics for 2022? Actually no.

I would speculate as to what the better birth rate for 2022 is due to. In 2021 and the beginning of 2022 in Bulgaria there was hope that things were finally going in the right direction, that the vicious schemes, the drawers and the captured state were becoming a thing of the past. Alas, that hope was killed by a group of charlatans who today try to take credit for themselves.