ZAGREB, 26 February, 2021 - Opposition parties said on Friday that the record GDP fall of 8.4% in 2020 was due to the coronavirus crisis as well as the lack of appropriate measures to bail out entrepreneurs and the government's unwillingness to abolish parafiscal levies and put the system of public procurement in order.
Social Democratic Party (SDP) political secretary and MP Mirela Ahmetović said this was the biggest GDP fall since Croatia declared independence and that it was to have been expected.
"Now, it's important to see how the government will react to that fall, what it will do to revive the economy and if it will succeed in that. Yesterday we saw that Finance Minister Zdravko Marić was uncomfortable when asked whether bailout measures would continue, to which he responded that they 'did not recognise the situation'." I find it sad that the finance minister and prime minister do not recognise the situation even though we have been in this situation for a year," Ahmetović told reporters in Parliament House.
Asked whether she expected a faster economic recovery than that after the 2009 crisis, which is what the government has announced, Ahmetović said, "Do you believe in a government which, one day prior to the expiry of the moratorium on loan payments and debt enforcement, does not have any plan of what to do next? Do you believe in a government whose minister says that they cannot tell how the situation will develop?."
Bridge MP Nino Raspudić underscored that the government cannot be blamed for the coronavirus pandemic and everything that it has brought. However, he added, we can talk about the years that were lost prior to the pandemic and why Croatia has not developed sufficiently in relation to other countries in the European Union.
This is an opportunity to discuss what to do next and we have proposed that the mandatory membership fees in the chambers of commerce and trades (HGK and HOK) be abolished. The proposal is not about abolishing any institution because such institutions function quite well on a voluntary basis, from Slovenia to other countries, Raspudić said.
In a situation in which the economy is stifled and we see that the funds to be obtained will be invested almost exclusively in the public sector, and, being aware that there cannot be any development in Croatia without a developed enterprise sector, we want to reduce the tax burden on it as much as possible, primarily parafiscal levies, of which there are abut 500, said Raspudić.
