Croatian small business sector shows improvement.
When Croatia’s Central Bureau of Statistics added exports whose value was initially under the inclusion ceiling to its first assessment of the overall export results for January, it turned out that the exports in January were not 0.6 percent lower than in January 2015, but actually 3.6 percent higher. The difference between the first estimate and the final calculation is only about 30 million euros, but it was enough to translate the negative assessment into a positive one. More importantly, the credit for this belongs to small exporters, those who do not make over 900,000 kuna of annual exports, which is the threshold for inclusion this year, reports liderpress.hr on April 17, 2016.
While in January the exports amounted to 770 million euros, the first estimates for February show, again without the numbers relating to the smallest exporters, that the exports in the second month of this year exceeded 900 million euros. The information available so far indicates that the exports rose by 2.7 percent in the first two months of this year compared to the same period in 2015, but when all those below the threshold are added to the final calculation for February, the growth will amount to about four percent. However, this would still be well below the growth achieved last year and the year before, when it was over 10 percent.
Zvonimir Savić, director of the Sector for Financial Institutions, Business Information and Economic Analysis at the Croatian Chamber of Economy, expects that the similar pace of export growth will continue this year, but it will be slower than last year.
“According to preliminary results, commodity exports in February apparently grew slightly faster than imports, in contrast to January, causing a bit slower growth of the foreign trade deficit in the first two months. We expect that the developments in foreign trade will remain similar until the end of the year, which mostly depends on the demand in both foreign and domestic markets, but also on many other factors”, Savić said.
