Commenting on the pace of the debt growth from 70.7% in Q3 2013 to 78% in Q3 2014, Raiffeisenbank Austria analyst Zrinka Zivkovic-Matijevic warned that this trend in public debt was unviable.
"The debt has been rising since 2010, as a result of accumulated budget deficit. Evidently, Croatia failed again in 2014 to stabilise a public debt level, due to postponing the restructure of the public sector. We still spend more than we create," she said.
Apart from Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria were another two EU member states with a market rise in the debt-BDP ratio in Q3 2014 compared to Q3 2013.
Slovenia's debt jumped by 16.8 percentage points from 61.3% to 78.3%, and Bulgaria's debt rose 6.6 percentage points from 17.1% to 23.6%, Eurostat reported on Thursday.
"The highest ratios of government debt to GDP at the end of the third quarter of 2014 were recorded in Greece (176.0%), Italy (131.8%) and Portugal (131.4%), and the lowest in Estonia (10.5%), Luxembourg (22.9%) and Bulgaria (23.6%)," Eurostat reported.
"At the end of the third quarter of 2014, the government debt to GDP ratio in the euro area (EA18) stood at 92.1%, compared with 92.7% at the end of the second quarter of 2014. In the EU28, the ratio decreased from 87.0% to 86.6%. This decrease in the EU28 government debt to GDP ratio comes after fifteen consecutive quarters of increase. Compared with the third quarter of 2013, the government debt to GDP ratio rose in both the euro area (from 91.1% to 92.1%) and the EU28 (from 85.3% to 86.6%)."