Croatia is a small country of great business opportunities and a regional leader when it comes to the implementation of reforms and economic reconstruction and with this kind of infrastructure, it has the right to claim that companies that which want to expand to Europe's southeast should choose Croatia as their starting point, Polancec said at the seminar, organised by the Croatian Chamber of the Economy and the Japanese Embassy in Croatia.
Polancec also said Croatia planned to invest 8 billion kuna in the so-called low-laying railroad which will connect the port of Rijeka with central Europe.
He stressed that Croatia had so far attracted 12 billion euros of foreign direct investments, adding however, that only a small share of the said amount was invested in the export-oriented production projects, namely that the majority of investments was made in the privatisation and taking a position on the Croatian market.
Japanese Ambassador Tetsuhisa Shirakawa said the biggest obstacle to a stronger economic cooperation between the two countries were insufficient information, adding that the fact that there had been no Japanese investments in Croatia so far did not mean that Japanese businessmen were not interested in investing.
He said that in order to realise cooperation it is necessary to provide more information on the investment climate in Croatia which is one of the reasons why today's seminar was organised.
According to the figures released by Croatian Bureau of Statistics, the two countries' trade last year amounted to 417.6 million dollars with Croatia's exports to Japan totalling 94 million, 85.3 percent up from 2005. In the same period imports from Japan went up by 18.3 percent, reaching 323.6 million dollars.