Bulgaria’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) aims to facilitate economic and social recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and to create a more sustainable, equitable, and successful economy. It includes a set of schemes not only to restore the economy's growth potential but to boost it, too. In achieving this, several construction projects to increase energy efficiency and decrease CO2 impact are to be implemented in 2023-2026, says Anita Dangova at EPI, EECFA’s Bulgarian research institute.

Previous optimism over the prospect of the construction market in the Southeast European region is gone, the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association (EECFA) reports. The current forecast is foreshadowing almost no growth until 2023 and contraction in 2024. The main reason behind is the worsening climate for construction due to the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to Yasen Georgiev from EPI, EECFA Bulgaria, like elsewhere in the EECFA countries that are not directly impacted by the war in Ukraine, the construction market in Bulgaria entered a period of an increasing unpredictability. What stands behind is an interplay between domestic and external factors.

Serbia’s construction market was booming when the economic and geopolitical situation changed, so the complicating circumstances in the world are stifling the potential growth and slowing down the ongoing recovery. Inflationary pressures have exploded with the start of the war in Ukraine and the effects of the current crisis are still unforeseeable, writes Dejan Krajinović from Beobuild Core d.o.o. for EECFA Serbia.

For Croatia, as for other EECFA countries, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been both a supply shock and a demand shock. And many of the elements of these shocks are the same for Croatia as for other EECFA countries. On the supply side, energy costs are rising as are the costs of construction materials and of construction finance. Supply chains and labour markets have also been disrupted. On the demand side, inflation has cut into consumers’ real disposable income, consumer confidence has been shaken as a result and finance for real estate purchases has become more expensive, says Michael Glazer, SEE Regional Advisor at EECFA Croatia.

Romania’s trade relations with Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are limited, but the country has been importing raw materials from these countries that are used in the local construction market, according to an analysis by the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association (EECFA). 

The impact assessment of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on the Slovenian construction market must take into account the current volatile situation associated with the pandemic. Even before the war in Ukraine started, building material manufacturers reduced their capacity, either due to logistics problems resulting from the global closure of countries or due to declining demand. As the last wave of the pandemic ended, supply failed to keep up with increased demand and construction material prices began to rise, writes Dr Aleš Pustovrh (Bogatin d.o.o.) for EECFA Slovenia.

According to the forecast of EECFA, the Romanian construction industry is poised to grow in both 2022 and 2023. The main drivers of growth vary, including low interest rates and excess liquidity that boost the residential subsector or the use of EU 2014-2020 cohesion funds to help boost civil engineering, writes Dr Sebastian Sipos-Gug from Ebuild srl / EECFA Romania.

Romania is expected to see only moderate growth on the horizon. Serbia, having recorded the biggest expansion of almost 100% in the 2014-2020 period, is foreseen to plateau in the upcoming years, according to the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association’s 2021 Winter Construction Forecast Report.

Croatia’s remarkable recovery from the brutal impact that the COVID-19 epidemic had on the country in 2020 is, like its construction boom, both real and smoke and mirrors, both temporary and long-term, according to Michael Glazer (SEE Regional Advisors) and Tatjana Halapija (Nada Projekt), the Eastern European Construction Forecasting Association’s members in Croatia.