Foreign investments in this year's first half dropped in relation to the same period last year as a result of the fact that reinvested profit accounted for 49 percent of last year's investments, which totalled $1.9 billion, Jemric said presenting a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) world report on foreign investments in 2003.
The report focuses on investments in services, with Croatia following this trend because foreign investments have been mostly directed into the services sector from the start.
In the last 11.5 years, post and telecommunications services accounted for 21 percent of all foreign investments, while financial mediation, especially the banking sector, accounted for 20 percent.
In the first half of this year, two-thirds of foreign investments referred to financial mediation and commerce, Jemric said.
Most direct ownership investments over the last 11.5 years referred to privatisation (around $3.9 billion), while greenfield investments accounted for some $1.4 billion. According to figures from the central bank, Croatian companies invested $62.5 million abroad in the first six months of this year and in the past 11.5 years they mostly invested in former Yugoslav countries, which account for around one-third of all investments,.
According to UNCTAD data, Croatia is ranked fourth among Central and Eastern European countries according to the value of foreign investments, following Poland ($4.2 billion), the Czech Republic ($2.6 billion) and Hungary ($2.4 billion).
A special advisor for UNCTAD, Branko Vukmir, said that one of the reasons why Croatia did not manage to attract more investments over the past 11 years were problems in privatisation and the war in the early 1990s, which was the best privatisation period in Central and Eastern Europe.
A state secretary at the National Strategy Office, Ante Babic, said the government would speed up the process of privatisation as well as establish an agency for attracting foreign investments by the end of the year.