Mp Boris Lalovac referred on Tuesday to data on a 2.8 percent increase in GDP, saying that the government is drawing on tourism while exports are declining, and that these data do not reflect a realistic picture of the lives of citizens who live very poorly by standard.

The Croatian Bureau of Statistics (CBS) announced earlier today that thanks to the growth of consumption and investments, the Croatian economy grew in the third quarter of this year, for the 11th quarter in a row, by 2.8 percent year-on-year, faster than in the previous quarter. Commenting on these data, sdp's mp said in parliament that "the third quarter was under the greatest influence of tourism and it turned out that this year too it pulled us out in terms of economic growth". We need to see if tourism has pulled us out in terms of arrivals or through higher prices, because what we have seen this summer is a price jump in prices," he argued. He added that exports have fallen by 8.5 per cent in Terms of GDP, which shows that export markets are already slowly closing, estimating that this will be seen in the fourth quarter. Referring to the recent EUROSTAT report on the standard of citizens in the European Union, the SDP MP said that Croatia is the country with the worst deficit in the household budget in Europe." Somewhere around 51 billion euros is the spending of citizens for living needs, and they collect through salaries, pensions and the like 41 billion. So all citizens lack a total of 10 billion euros to close household budgets," Lalovac said. He believes that "this is an indication that we are the worst in Europe. When you look at the cost of food, for example, we see that Croats, along with Romania, spend the most on food and it shows you that we cannot close those needs either," he added. Lalovac says that the focus should be on the standard of living because by these standards, Croats live very badly.