June 7 (SeeNews) - The Croatian government said it plans to gradually decrease public debt to 65.4% of the country's gross domestic product in 2021 from 71.6% envisaged for the end of 2019.
Next year, the public debt-to-GDP ratio is seen declining to 68.5%, according to the government's 2019-2021 Public Debt Management Strategy adopted on Thursday.
Positive fiscal trends in the past three years have helped reduce the public debt-to-GDP ratio by almost 10 percentage points - to 74.6% at the end of 2018 from 83.7% at end-2015, finance minister Zdravko Maric, who presented the strategy, said as quoted by the government.
Croatia reported a budget surplus of 1.0% of GDP in 2016, 0.8% of GDP in 2017 and 0.2% of GDP in 2018 even though the government had to pay last year activated state guarantees worth 2.5 billion kuna ($379 million/337 million euro) on behalf of troubled shipbuilding company Uljanik.
(1 euro = 7.42140 kuna)