Croatia and the EU

[Don Madge]

Croatia is a popular destination and if all goes to plan it looks like they will join the EU on the 1st July 2013 See

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/824&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

 

Don

[Charles Chodkowski]

But hopefully not the Euro!

[Losos]

Charles Chodkowski - 2011-08-06 5:51 PM But hopefully not the Euro!

Well they've still got nearly two years to fiddle all their figures and make like they've got a huge balance of payments surplus, and really good tax gathering system, and no deficit, and lots of gold in their central bank vaults, or they could just copy the figures Greece presented to the Brussels muppets when they joined!!!!!

[Dave225]

Croatia is a lovely country and the people are friendly. They already base most of their prices on euro equivalents so if they do join the single currency, then most people will be familiar with the new prices. However, as mentioned they have 2 years to go and if they look at the experi3ence of some of the more recent joining countries, they may wish to look again. Although new entrants did receive money from Brussels,w hcih is what they wanted, they then discovered the sting in the tail and had to pay into the EU currency safety net funds. As this will have to be increased to about 2 trillion if the experts are right, then the costs are going to be very high for each Euro zone country.

 

The other thing to consider is that it is not just Croatia that wants to join, it also includes Albania, Bosnia, Serbia Montenegro and Macedonia. Croatia is a peaceful and has a relatively good economy, some of the others are not, so as a UK citizen seeing any expansion of this nature does not fill me with great joy, although I have the greatest of respect for Croatians.

 

Also, if the current crisis does lead to a north south split in the EU, one does wonder what that would mean for many countries.