"To get rich, build roads first." This saying still held true at the start of the twentieth century. Bulgaria might have planned a whole host of industrial projects, but in reality, most of them had yet to begin.
Everyone was waiting for the government to build the roads. As long as the transportation problem remained unresolved, grand industrial plans were nothing but castles in the air!
The homeland in the Balkans had already been developed quite well. Ferdinand had no plans to continue expanding heavy industry there, while development in the other regions lagged far behind. Even the Asia Minor peninsula, which the Ottoman Empire had managed for centuries, possessed scarcely any industry worth mentioning.
Road construction had begun in 1916, when the Bulgarian army landed on the Asia Minor peninsula. At present, the railway company still had more than a million prisoners of war toiling for this great and sacred undertaking.
Adding prisoners, ordinary railway workers, industrial workers in supporting enterprises, and technical personnel, the Bulgarian Railway Company alone employed more than 2.6 million people!
Now that the Grand Highway Project had begun, Bulgaria's vast road-building army would once again exceed one-tenth of the total population—more precisely, one-tenth of the registered population!
Under normal circumstances, such a high proportion of labor investment would naturally have been impossible. Other domestic industries also needed workers. Fortunately, this was the colonial era, and cheap labor was still available.
By the end of 1921, Bulgaria's registered population had surpassed 48.76 million. More than 3.4 million of them were naturalized immigrants, while the rest came entirely from new births.
Perhaps they had been suppressed for too long during the World War. Beginning in 1919, a domestic baby boom erupted, and in 1920, the birth rate reached its peak at 5.18%. (Based on Russian data.)