A million Bulgarians are below the absolute poverty line, representatives of the World Bank (WB) announced last Thursday, presenting the latest report of the bank on living standards at a two-day seminar in Bulgaria.

Compared to 1995, when the share of the impoverished population was 5.5 per cent, poverty in Bulgaria has risen twice. Yet it has fallen drastically since 1997, when the crisis during Zhan Videnov's leftist Government saw a poverty rate of 36 per cent.

About 7.9 per cent have been placed below the international poverty line of $2.15 per day, determined for developing countries in conditions similar to Bulgaria. A third of the population gets by on less than $4.30 per day, which is the absolute minimum for developed countries.

In Central and Eastern Europe, only Romanians and Latvians are poorer than Bulgarians, while Ukranians and Estonians are twice better off than Bulgarians, and the living standard of Poland and the Czech Republic is far ahead.

Most endangered by poverty were the ethnic minorities of Roma and Turks, which make up 4.6 and 9.4 per cent of Bulgaria's population respectively, according to a recent census. Half of impoverished Bulgarians are Roma.

Roma were also the only ethnic group to grow between 1992 and 2001, while the number of Bulgarians diminished over the past 10 years of transition, data from the census showed.

Roma were 10 times more likely than other ethnicities to be poor, and ethnic Turks were four times more likely to be poor, the report said.

Most of them do not use electricity and gas for heating and domestic purposes and rely chiefly on wood and coal. Eighty per cent of the Roma do not have indoor toilets, 90 per cent do not have telephones and less than a third have electric stoves.

The data analysis also showed that poverty was related to education. Seventy per cent of Bulgarians who held only a primary school diploma, or had not been schooled at all, lived in destitution. Among those with higher education, only 1.5 per cent were poor.

Roma were again the least educated social stratum. Only 8 per cent of them had secondary education and 0.8 per cent had graduated from a college or university.

The WB noted a "widening gap in access to basic education for the poor", creating a "vicious circle of poverty."

WB officials criticised the Government for the recent double increase in child allowances and said that it would "have no effect on poverty". Larger families with five and more members formed 30 per cent of the population and almost 60 per cent of the poorest strata of society, mostly of Roma origin.

Poverty rates were highest in the rural areas and lowest in the larger cities. Village populations lived with a standard four times lower than those in cities. The poorest people live around Plovdiv, Varna and Bourgas, while the Sofianites were best off.

Experts explained this outcome with the old administrative division, which was a basis for the study. In the old division, villages in the Rhodopes, where traditionally poor populations lived, were included in Plovdiv region.