As Nenad Bakic/eclectica.hr writes on the 23rd of June, 2019, for a long time now, it’s been well known in Croatia that big capital and the Adriatic coast go hand in hand.
In general, Croatia has long been ”heroically fighting against neoliberal capitalism”, and rather successfully at that. The only issue with that is the fact that the premise was wrong because it was just as “well known” that such a type of capitalism had already stepped ”into bed” with us and for some, it was quite a comfortable situation, although the real truth in itself was completely different.
Not to take away from the many entrepreneurs and invention this country has given to the world, Croatia continues to take many an unimpressive title when it comes to anything outside of natural beauty, which is something we can’t influence (thank God). When speaking economically, Croatia is the least free country in the European Union behind Greece, and of course, Croatia is rather tragically lagging behind in almost every single significant aspect, and people are leaving in their droves, and that demographic leaking tap isn’t going to stop dripping.
Croatia’s struggle against “big” capital in the tourism industry was a wrong move, though perhaps of a somewhat visionary nature.
The result of the situation with big capital on the Croatian coast is the following: The coast is concreted over by apartments, and the share of Croatian hotel accommodation is half the size of the of that of the next EU country.
This chart shows the share of accommodation for foreign tourists, according to overnight stays spent:
Specifically, for hotels it looks like this:
As you can see, the share of accommodation in Croatian hotels is exactly 1/3 of the European Union average.
For apartments, things look like this:
Bakić adds the fact that it is regularly forgotten that Croatia has an incredibly unique advantage, and it’s reachable by some 100 million people by car (the captive market). In addition, real tourism is a capital and a work-intensive activity, and because of the Croatian shortage of labour which is a result of the demographic crisis and issues with the payment of living wages, hotels are up on their feet. For apartments, this is much less important.
You can follow more from Nenad Bakić on his Eclectica website.
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