The Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) revised the foreign direct investments (FDI) figure for 2006 from 4.364 billion euro to approximately six billion euro in what is a 37 per cent increase, Dnevnik daily reported on March 17.

Upward revision of 2007 FDI in 2007 added another 400 million euro, or 7.4 per cent, to 6.1 billion euro.

The changes were primarily due to the non-financial companies' late filing of annual reports with the National Statistics Institute (NSI), as well as to the last quarter reports of foreign-owned companies with the central watchdog.

BNB did not rule out the 2007 figures would undergo another correction in the future, to as high as seven billion euro.

The correction is likely to have an impact on other macro-economic parameters such as the gross domestic product, the share of the current account deficit as a percentage of GDP and the FDI coverage of the current account deficit.

Companies from the extraction and processing, electricity, fuel and water sectors prompted the most substantial changes because they are the slowest in filing information with the NSI and the BNB. At the same time, the least significant changes were in the real estate and the financial brokerage sectors. These two sectors are subject to more serious control, hence, data is gathered faster.

The correction put The Netherlands atop the 2006 FDI ranking by country, with overall investments of one billion euro. Belgium and Luxembourg, which are considered one entity for the statistical purposes by the BNB, topped the ranking for 2007 with a total of 779 million euro. Before the revision, Britain was the country with highest FDI for both years with investments of, respectively, 817 million and 728 million euro.