The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is continuing to throw proverbial spanners in the works for almost everything imaginable, and the global economy is suffering tremendously and in a truly unprecedented way. The Croatian economy, which relies heavily on tourism as it makes up a huge amount of the country’s GDP, has been far from immune from the negative trends caused by the measures introduced to try to prevent the spread of the novel virus.
Croatian producers, particularly exporters, have been as plagued by the virus and intermittent lockdowns as the vast majority of other sectors across Croatia and Europe, but 2021 has managed to bring with it some surprising and encouraging results which might well mean that things are finally on the up again.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, in the first two months of 2021, Croatian exports were down 1.4 percent (when looking at it from the perspective of the Croatian kuna) and 2.8 percent in euros on an annual basis.
2021’s first quarter also saw a significantly more favourable ratio between the value of exports and imports, as the coverage of imports by exports improved significantly and amounted to 64.6 percent. In the first quarter of last year, the ratio stood at a lesser 60.3 percent.
The more favourable ratio is a direct result of slower growth in imports, which was 2.1 percent higher in Croatian kuna and 0.6 percent higher in euros. Since this is the first data without details on the structure to have been made available, there is no precise data on what contributed most to this promising export jump, and it can only be established that growth also took place on most important single market (7.3 percent in euros), and to a somewhat stronger scale outside of the single market (9.2 percent in euros).
In absolute numbers, in the first three months of 2021, the Croatian economy exported products worth 30.0 billion kuna, or 3.97 billion kuna. 46.48 billion kuna or 6.15 billion euros worth of goods were imported, which is a record result for that particular period.
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