Addressing the ceremony, PM Kosor recalled that Croatia's Gross Domestic Product rebounded by 0.8% in the second quarter of 2011 and expressed hope that the GDP growth in Q3 2011 would be certainly higher which would signal that "this year is definitely when we have pulled out of the crisis".
According to Kosor, since the government presented 40 big infrastructure projects, the value of which is EUR 40 billion in total, three billion euros of investments have been carried out so far.
Josip Skoric, the CEO of the Hrvatske Ceste (HC), a state-owned company in charge of building and operating roads, said that the new project would improve the flow of the traffic on this ring road, which is, according to HC figures, one of the busiest roads in Croatia.
According to HC, in 2010 more than 18,000 vehicles passed per day along Osijek's 12.1-kilometre south ring road, which is a section of the D2 state road.
The HC company is the investor of this project of upgrading the south bypass into a four-lane route. The new lanes are to be built by the Osijek Koteks construction company in the next 30 months.