The New Thinnest Book in the World: Croatian Reasons for Optimism

Do you know what the three thinnest books in the world are? A few decades ago, the answer in a joke was: the Somali cookbook, the Albanian telephone directory, and Russian civil law. I remembered this joke when I tried to list recent Croatian reasons for optimism. There are fewer of them than dishes in the Somali cookbook. In fact, I can only think of one reason for optimism in Croatia: it can’t get worse than it is now. Or, maybe, it can?

Could another corruption scandal of gigantic proportions emerge? Are there any candidates among the Deputy Prime Ministers for an investigation by USKOK? Will our Prime Minister one morning greet us with a statement that it is time for new beginnings, as her predecessor did? What if Kyrgyzstan, for some unusual geographical reason, does not belong to the same region as Croatia? Croatia would not be the second worst country in the region, but the last. It really can’t get worse.

Therefore, it is not surprising that 57 percent of Croatian directors believe that the economic situation in the country will worsen in the next six months; rather, it is surprising that as many as 17 percent of them believe that the business conditions in our country will improve! This is, in fact, the result of a survey by the consulting and auditing firm Deloitte, ‘Indicator of Attitudes in the Business Sector’. Unlike Croatian directors, who lead in pessimism, business people across Central Europe remain cautious, but their optimism regarding the economic recovery of the region is continuously growing.

It is easy for them to be optimistic when the governments of their countries have taken various measures to help their economies overcome the recession as easily and quickly as possible. What has our government done? For a year, it denied that the country was in crisis, then the Prime Minister resigned with a statement that it was time for new beginnings and left the government in the hands of her deputy, who in happier times might have been a successful Prime Minister, but she was not up to the task she was thrown into. If she had been ready to take over the government, she should have first assembled her own team. The greatest anti-recession achievement of that government was the adoption of a program for exiting the crisis in April this year, but without any indication that this program could actually be implemented.

And where could one find reasons for optimism then? If only I knew the names of those 17 percent from Deloitte’s research, I would ask them: On what basis do you, gentlemen, believe that the business conditions in Croatia will improve in the next six months? What do you know that others do not? Please share that knowledge with others. Let’s try together to compile a book of reasons for optimism in Croatia that will have at least one more line than the Albanian telephone directory had half a century ago.