This year for the first time in 14 years, Croatia will realise the same Gross Domestic Product as in 1990. This, however, is not fast enough if Croatia wants to enter the European Bloc, said Belosevic-Matic, the head of the HGK Macroeconomic Analyses Department's director.
Presenting trends in the national economy, she said that 2004 saw the continuation of the rise of GDP from the past four years. At the end of this year a real rate of the growth is likely to be the projected four percent.
After 2000, this year was the first to see a faster pace of the rise in exports than in imports.
Expressed in US dollars, exports in the first nine months of 2004 rose by 29.9 percent in comparison to the January-September period in 2003. The rise in imports came to 18.1 percent. Expressed in Croatian kuna, exports rose by 16.9 percent while imports rose by 6.3 percent.
The deficit of the consolidate general state was cut by 4.5 percent of GDP this year as against 6.3 percent last year.
The rise in Croatia's external debt was slower in the first nine months of 2004 when it rose by 11.8 percent (namely 2.8 billion dollars) to US$26.3 billion as against the US$ 4.8 billion increase in the first nine months of 2003.
Industrial output in the first nine months of 2004 went up by 2.8 percent.
The number of employed Croatians rose by only 0.1 percent to 1, 393,453 at the end of October when the unemployment rate was 18.1 percent, which was one percentage point less than in October 2003.
The inflation rate in the first ten months of 2004 was two percent.