  Our understanding of the chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge requires
the determination of abundances in large samples of giant stars and planetary
nebulae (PNe). We discuss PNe abundances in the Galactic bulge and compare
these results with those presented in the literature for giant stars. We
present the largest, high-quality data-set available for PNe in the direction
of the Galactic bulge (inner-disk/bulge). For comparison purposes, we also
consider a sample of PNe in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We derive the
element abundances in a consistent way for all the PNe studied. By comparing
the abundances for the bulge, inner-disk, and LMC, we identify elements that
have not been modified during the evolution of the PN progenitor and can be
used to trace the bulge chemical enrichment history. We then compare the PN
abundances with abundances of bulge field giant. At the metallicity of the
bulge, we find that the abundances of O and Ne are close to the values for the
interstellar medium at the time of the PN progenitor formation, and hence these
elements can be used as tracers of the bulge chemical evolution, in the same
way as S and Ar, which are not expected to be affected by nucleosynthetic
processes during the evolution of the PN progenitors. The PN oxygen abundance
distribution is shifted to lower values by 0.3 dex with respect to the
distribution given by giants. A similar shift appears to occur for Ne and S. We
discuss possible reasons for this PNe-giant discrepancy and conclude that this
is probably due to systematic errors in the abundance derivations in either
giants or PNe (or both). We issue an important warning concerning the use of
absolute abundances in chemical evolution studies.
