A long period of economic mismanagement and political instability in the early 1990s delayed Bulgaria’s transition from a planned to a market economy by nearly a decade compared with other countries from Central and Eastern Europe. Since 1997, the wide-ranging structural reform programme has encompassed liberalisation in the agricultural and energy sectors, the privatisation of enterprises and reform of the social sector. Thus, following negative real GDP growth in 1996 and 1997, the economy began to grow and continued to do so in the period afterwards.