Croatia's public debt amounted to 279.3 billion kuna (€37.8 billion) at the end of April 2018, down 0.6 percent month-on-month and 1.7 percent year-on-year, Raiffeisenbank Austria (RBA) analysts said on Friday in their comment on the data recently published by the central bank.

The domestic debt was down 0.4 percent compared to the month before, reaching 171.5 billion kuna (€23.2 billion), while Croatia’s external debt dropped by 0.9 percent to 107.8 billion kuna (€14.5 billion). This is mainly due to the decrease of the central government’s debt.

The state statistics bureau said recently the public debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of the first quarter of 2018 fell to 76.2 percent, or down by 6.4 percentage points year-on-year.

The government on Thursday adopted its economic and fiscal policy guidelines for the 2019-21 period, which projects that the public debt-to-GDP ratio would to fall from this year’s projected 74.5 percent to 71.5 percent in 2019, and on to 68.5 percent in 2020, and 65.4 percent in 2021.

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