Bulgaria’s Cabinet has voted to close down the Finance Ministry’s Agency for Economic Analysis and Forecasting as part of its optimization and austerity measures.

With its Wednesday’s decision, the government laid off 14 of the 43 employees of the Agency specializing in macroeconomic analysis, and transferred the other 29 to the existing Economic Planning and Analyses Directorate of the Finance Ministry, which will be taking over the functions and responsibility of the closed economic research body.

The Cabinet has also laid off 37 other employees of various branches of the Finance Ministry.

According to the government statement, the layoffs will be accompanied with changing the functions of some of the institutions in order to execute the program for austerity measures and staff optimization, including by shedding administrative bodies with overlapping functions.

The Bulgarian Finance Ministry has already laid off 94 employees since November 2009, and plans to dismiss another 47 by the beginning of 2011 in order to optimize its staff by 20% compared to the number of people it employed in August 2009 – 704.

Sources from the now closed Agency for Economic Analysis and Forecasting have told Novinite.com that the shutting down of their institution might have been motivated by the fact that the Agency enjoying a higher degree of independence as a research unit than the Ministry’s Directorate, which will assume its functions.