July 19 (SeeNews) - The governor of the Croatia's National Bank, HNB, said on Wednesday the bank has revised upward its forecast for the country's economic growth this year to 3.0% from 2.8% on the back of exports and growing investments.
The central bank expects exports to increase 6.6% on the year in 2017, while investments are seen to expand by 6.1%, Boris Vujcic told media in Zagreb.
Exports are mostly related to tourism, but exports of commodities too is flourishing, Vujcic noted.
On the downside, the crisis in the country's food and retail concern Agrokor could affect growth by about 0.3% this year, the governor warned.
He, however, noted that the adverse impact of the Agorkor crisis is more likely to be felt next year.
Over the past few months several banks cut their forecasts for Croatia's GDP growth due to problems in the concern.
Just last week, Raiffeisenbank Austria reduced by 0.4 percentage points to 2.9% its projections for the country's economic expansion. It commented that the Agrokor case had reopened the issue of long-standing weakness of Croatia's economy by underlying the problem of inability to collect payment.
Croatia's GDP growth accelerated to a real 2.9% in 2016, from 1.6% in 2015.