Are Bulgarian government employees disproportionally higher in number in relation to the total population of the country, and are they "tens of times" more numerous, in proportion, compared to the Netherlands and the US? No, that's not true: The figures indicated in the claim, which includes the total population of the three countries and the number of government employees, do not correspond to those released by official institutions in the three cited countries.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @daniborisiv on August 8, 2023.
The Bulgarian caption text, translated to English by Lead Stories staff, reads:
US: 312 million population, 800,000 government employees;
Netherlands: 16 million population, 20,000 government employees;
Bulgaria: 7 million population, 440,000 government employees.
Our officials are 45 times more than the Americans and 51 times more than the Dutch.
Proportionally, about 9,000 people should work in the state administration in our country, not 440,000!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Aug 16 07:05:24 2023 UTC)
A Google reverse image search performed by Lead Stories on August 16, 2023, found that the earliest publication of this image can be traced back to June 23, 2018 (an earlier date of March 2, 2017, appears next to the image, but when opening the post, the actual date is June 23, 2018). The recycled claim uses the same image as the 2018 social media Facebook post. However, the reported population figures for the Netherlands and the United States do not match the 2018 and 2023 official data.
For example, according to the claim, the Netherlands has a population of 16 million. The latest figures for 2023 indicate a total population in the country of over 17 million. Already in 2018, the population of the Netherlands was more than 17 million people. Аlso, according to the claim, the population of the United States is 312 million, while the latest updated data show that it exceeds 335 million. And in 2018, when the claim appeared, the population of the United States was over 327 million.
The claimed figures for the number of government employees in the three countries also do not match official figures. According to data from the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (NSI), 98,388 people were employed in the executive branch's administration for 2023. The same NSI data show that this number does not include the Ministry of Internal Affairs employees, who, according to the Ministry's data, are 53,301, and the Ministry of Defense employees, whose information are not publicly available, except for the figures related to the Bulgarian army, which indicate 37,000 personnel.
In addition, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), over 21 million Americans worked in the federal, state, and local U.S. government as of May 2022. And according to data from the official website of the central government of the Netherlands, the government employs 400,000 people divided into seven different sectors.
Even if we considered the possibility that the posted image was intended to indicate not only Bulgarian government employees but also the people working for the entire public sector, this would not explain the inaccurate figures for the number of civil servants in the United States and the Netherlands, nor the wrong figures for the public sector employees. Either way, the percentage difference for the three countries would be much lower than the one claimed in the TikTok.
