Bulgaria was the least attractive country for retail investment among the eight Central and Eastern European (CEE) states ranked in the Country Retail Attractiveness Index, published by PMR Publications, a British-American market survey and consultancy firm based in Poland.

On the upside, Bulgaria's low market concentration and modest number of well-recognised international retailers increased the attractiveness of thed country for new entrants.

Although demographics were encouraging, with urban dwellers accounting for 70 per cent of population and half of them living in cities with 100 000 residents or more, those advantages were overshadowed by weak macroeconomics factors in the European Union's poorest member state, PMR's survey said.

In compiling the index, PMR examined the retail markets in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia Hungary, Poland, Romania, as well as Russia and Ukraine, which topped the survey.

The greatest advantage of Ukraine and Russia over other countries of the region was abundance of large cities offering sizeable catchment areas even for the largest hypermarkets. In Russia, there were 160 cities with more than 100,000 of population. As much as 12 of them have more than one million of inhabitants, and Moscow and St Petersburg were home to 10 million and 4.5 million, respectively.

Ukraine, though much less populous than Russia, has five cities with a population above one million, including 2.6 million in capital Kiev. In every other country surveyed by PMR, only the capital city breaks one million, with exception of Slovakia, whose capital city Bratislava has a population of 450 000, which is comparable to medium-sized provincial Russian cities.

Even though Central European countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were small, they were more affluent.

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