March the 26th, 2025 – Just how much of Croatian tourism spending actually ends up outside of the country through imports? The majority of it, it seems.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Ljubica Gataric/VL writes, it can be concluded that for all the hype and the eye-watering sums of cash Croatian tourism brings in, it’s actually somewhat of a flow-through boiler. That means that most Croatian tourism spending actually goes to imports.
The economic contribution of tourism to the economy could be significantly higher. That is one of the main conclusions made by two Croatian scientists, Stjepan Srhoj, project leader of the Croatian Science Foundation, and Josip Mikulić, professor at the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb. This and more was revealed in their paper on tourism company spending, that was recently published by the world’s most prestigious, peer-reviewed tourism journal, Annals of Tourism Research.
This is actually the very first study to use transactions between companies to gain insight into the share of costs coming from imports. Only imports from the EU were analysed. A survey of 9,681 Croatian tourism companies for 2019 showed that at least 52% of the costs of tourism company suppliers went to imports. That provides a completely new insight into Croatian tourism spending, imports, and where that cash ends up. Only eight percent of imports went directly from the EU, and an additional 44% went through intermediaries, i.e. suppliers based within Croatia who imported these goods.
To simplify matters, for every 100 euros a tourism company spends in Croatia, at least 52 euros leave Croatia because of goods imported from elsewhere in the EU. Croatia is a very small country with less than 4 million inhabitants, but it plays host to over 21 million tourists a year. Each of these tourists comes with a certain budget, which opens up the opportunity to offer tourists Croatian products and thus function as a strong export country within Croatia’s own borders. However, Croatian tourism spending often “leaks” outside of national borders, and quite heavily, through imports.
Imports in themselves aren’t a bad thing. In fact, imports crucial for supply, but it is still important to understand their structure and scale. That was further explained by the authors of the paper, Stjepan Srhoj and Josip Mikulić. “We analysed the share of imports in the costs of suppliers of tourism companies. It turned out that at least 8% refers to direct imports, while an additional 44% comes through indirect imports, i.e. purchases from Croatian suppliers who themselves rely on imports. This means that in total, at least 52% of tourism companies’ costs go to imports, which suggests that tourism in Croatia functions in the way that money comes in, VAT stays in the country, but a significant part of it ultimately ends up abroad,” concluded Srhoj and Mikulić.
