At the onset of the 2008-2009 global economic crisis, the Open Society Institute-Sofia and the World Bank partnered to implement Crisis Monitoring Survey (CMS). The CMS is a multi-topic household survey that followed three nationally representative cross-sections of about 2,400 households, including a panel of about 1,700 Bulgarian households, during February 2010, October 2010 and February 2011. The survey included a detailed income module, but no consumption module. It tracked the incidence of income shocks, the coping strategies used by affected households to mitigate the income losses, and the impact of public polices social protection in particular in alleviating the effects of the crisis. In particular, the survey investigated in some depth how households used the labor market to mitigate the impact of the crisis, whether formal social protection programs protected households against sliding into poverty, and the effectiveness of informal safety nets. Given the special need to study the more vulnerable ethnic minority Roma population, an independent "booster sample" of about 300 households was selected in settlements and neighborhoods identified as predominantly Roma. The first round of Crisis Monitoring Survey was conducted in February 2010. The data from this round is documented here.
