BULGARIAN BUSINESS LEADERS LEARN ABOUT U.S. BUSINESS; GROUP OF 13 VISIT CAPE TO STUDY FREE MARKET

After four decades of communist rule, implementing a free-market system isn't an easy task, Bulgarian business leaders say.

"It's very, very hard," said Kina Kavgazova, director of Terra-EX Co., a Sofia-based firm that deals with agricultural goods.

"We have to learn it (free-market practices) from the beginning like we are 8-year-old children," she said.

Kavgazova is among 13 Bulgarian business leaders who are spending two weeks in Cape Girardeau attending the International Business Seminar sponsored by the Center for International Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. The Bulgarian group has been in Cape Girardeau since Oct. 22. The group will depart for home Nov. 6.

"What we are really focusing on is the operation of American business practices," said Marvin Swanson, director of the Center for International Studies.

The seminar involves classroom presentations as well as visits with local governmental and business leaders, and visits to a number of area businesses.

Tuesday, eight of the Bulgarian business leaders visited A.G. Edwards and Sons Inc., a stock brokerage firm in Cape Girardeau.

Swanson said, "What it amounts to is that people in Eastern Europe are going through tremendous economic and social changes.

"Now under its new government ... it's possible for individuals to own their own businesses," he pointed out.

John Blue, who is coordinating the program for the university, said Bulgaria's private businesses have been established in just the last two years.

"For 40 years they have had no free-enterprise system," he said. As a result, he said, the recent development of private businesses has been "a bootstrap operation for all of these people."

In an interview Tuesday afternoon on the university campus, Kavgazova, along with Gueorgui Mantchev, president of Terra-EX Co., and Veselin Ralchev, executive director of Syco in Sofia, a consulting, training and project management company, discussed Bulgaria's efforts to restructure its economy.

"From the outside, it looks easy to change to a free-market economy," said Mantchev. But, he said, in reality it is a difficult task.

"Business planning is completely new to us," he said.

Kavgazova said, "It's a hell of a job to be done."

The mountainous nation has an inflation rate of 800 percent and shortages in goods and supplies.

Under the communist system, prices were fixed by the state and kept low. Now, prices are free to rise. Lemons and oranges, for example, are very expensive now, she said.

With the current state of the economy, there are divisions between the haves and the have-nots, Kavgazova said.

She said most Bulgarians are committed to moving ahead with a free-market, private-property system.

Mantchev said that he and other business leaders in the past worked for state-owned enterprises. Now, they are working in the private sector. That, he said, requires learning a whole new system of business.

"In the old system, I could fail 100 times and I would still get the same money," he said.

There are still state enterprises, but those are expected to be sold under a privatization law.

Ralchev, with Kavgazova and Mantchev interpreting his remarks, said that Bulgaria's small, private businesses currently don't have ready access to international business and financial information.

The Bulgarian business leaders said private, foreign investment is important for the nation's economy.

"It's just a matter of investment," said Kavgazova.

Mantchev said foreign companies have been reluctant to invest in enterprises in Bulgaria. "They still think it is a temporary change."

But, he insisted, Bulgaria has made a permanent change to a more democratic and free-market system.

Both Mantchev and Kavgazova said they hope to see future exchanges involving business leaders and university students from Cape Girardeau and Bulgaria.