Beyond Costing Basic Needs: Comparative Foundations and a Mixed-Methods Framework for Policy-Relevant Reference Budgets in Bulgaria

Reference budgets (RBs) have recently received increasing attention as a mechanism for informing income adequacy assessment and social policy design, though the methodological basis of these outlines is often dispersed through practices and guidelines with strong roots in Western European welfare contexts. This article presents a pragmatic approachbased on an ex-ante methodological framework for development of reference budgets, which can be operationalized by comparison with common practice and mixedmethods rationale.

The paper conceptualizes a post transition economy as an analytical stress test, where Bulgaria serves as the application context to elicit design logic, epistemological positioning and validation mechanisms before empirical testing. Pathways are explored comparatively drawing on international literature and models of EU-level harmonisation through alternative methodological approaches which could be defined as purely normative or purely consensual. The framework leverages a hybrid mix-methods model-oriented design integrating normative reasoning, structured societal deliberation, expert calibration and market-based costing.

The analysis suggests that policy-relevant reference budgets must be validated from multiple, interconnected angles: they need to be internally coherent, externally benchmarked and legitimized by relevant social and institutional processes. It also further underscores the need to make a clear distinction between routine rebasement, which retains longitudinal consistency while allowing for normative change, and any full methodological reconstruction.

The article provides an empirically grounded and validation-oriented methodological framework that connects academic reference budget research with the practical policy design by offering transferable high-level principles of design rather than national implementation. Though the paper is focused on Bulgaria, its conceptual reflections are relevant to future empirical research and cross-country analysis that can improve measures of adequacy of income.