ZAGREB, June 7, 2018 – In the first quarter of 2018, Croatia, Great Britain and France recorded the lowest GDP growth rates in the European Union quarter-on-quarter, according to an estimate published on Thursday by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.
Croatia’s seasonally adjusted GDP in Q1 2018 was up 0.2%, compared with the previous quarter when economic activity stagnated, according to Eurostat. An identical growth rate in Q1, 2018 was recorded in France while the growth rate in Great Britain was even lower – 0.1%, according to Eurostat.
Other leading European economies recorded slow growth rates as well – GDP growth in Italy and Germany was only 0.3%.
Among member states for which data are available for the first quarter of 2018, Latvia and Poland recorded the highest growth compared with the previous quarter (both +1.6%), followed by Hungary and Finland (both +1.2%).
Slightly negative growth was observed in Estonia (-0.1%) while GDP in Romania stagnated.
According to Eurostat, Croatia’s GDP in the first three months of 2018 grew by 1.5% on the year. In Q4, 2017, it grew by 2.3%.
Eurostat confirmed that seasonally adjusted GDP rose by 0.4% in both the euro area (EA19) and the EU28 during the first quarter of 2018, compared with the previous quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2017, GDP had grown by 0.7% in both zones. Compared with the same quarter of the previous year, seasonally adjusted GDP rose by 2.5% in the euro area and by 2.4% in the EU28 in the first quarter of 2018, after +2.8% and +2.7% respectively in the previous quarter.
In other economic news, Croatia’s exports in the first four months of 2018 came to 33.03 billion kuna, rising by one percent compared to the corresponding period in 2017, whereas imports increased by 5.6% to 55.5 billion kuna, according to the first results released by the national statistical office (DZS) on Thursday.
The deficit in the trade exchange totalled 22.5 billion kuna in the January-April period this year, up by 2.6 billion year-on-year. The coverage of imports by exports shrank from 62.2% to 59.5%.
In the first four months of 2018, exports to EU member states rose 7.8% to 22.89 billion kuna, and exports to non-EU members declined by 11.5% to 10.1 billion kuna.
Imports from EU member states rose 6.1% to 43.98 billion kuna, while imports from non-EU member states rose 3.9% to 11.5 billion kuna.
Expressed in the euro, exports in the first four months of 2018 totalled 4.4 billion euro, rising 1.3% on the year, while imports went up 5.9% to 7.4 billion euro. The trade deficit was 3 billion euro, up from 2.6 billion euro in the first four months of 2017.
