Economy In Croatia

In the early 1990s included high inflation rate. The Croatian dinar started in 1991 as a transitional currency to curb inflation, but inflation instead continued to increase.

Nonetheless, the anti-inflationary stabilization measures in 1993 reduced inflation of retail price from a rate of 38.7% to 1.4% per month, and Croatia experienced deflation by the end of that year.

Croatia introduced kuna in 1994 as its currency. Following this, macro-stabilization programs were initiated stopping the negative Croatia GDP growth. However, at the start of 2023 the country adopted the euro.

Private sector investments and consumer spending which were postponed during the war led to the growth from 1995 to 1997. This also made Croatia introduce a value-added tax to its economy in early 1998. That year, the central government financial plan was in surplus and it used this to repay external debt.

At the end of 1998, government debt to GDP had dropped from 27.40% to 26.30%. In 1999, the GDP share of the private sector reached 60% though it was still lower than in other related countries.

After undergoing many fiscal changes and improvement strategies, the economy in Croatia began to grow steadily during 2015 and continued in 2016 where the growth reached 3.5%.

Due to consecutive months of Croatia’s economy growth, labor demand, and the outflows of its citizens to other European countries, Croatia registered the biggest drop of unemployment rate from 16.1% to 12.7%.

Currently, Croatia’s economy is rapidly growing and trade is important to the growth.

The value of imports and exports combined amounts to 96% of GDP, and the average rate of applied tariff is 1.3%.