GLOBAL ECONOMY TEN YEARS AFTER THE BEGINING OF THE CRISIS

The past decade was marked by the crisis that started showing its signs at the end of 2007. In 2008 it became clear that the crisis will occur and in 2009 crisis reached its full capacity. Having in mind the experience from the Great depression in the 1930s, and crisis following the Second World War, economic science and economic policy started actions to stop the latter crisis. There were diverse reactions by different countries. In general, the world crisis was stopped already in 2010, but consequences will surely exist throughout longer time period. Some of them were evident immediately, such as production and export drop and decrease of employment rate. Some of them haven’t been so noticeable at the first glance, such as social consequences and uneven distribution of the crisis burden between different social groups within a country and among different countries. Some consequences have been postponed for the future, such as bonds used for financing some of the crisis costs, that are today rarely traded and with negative interest rates. Croatian policy did not find a way out of the crisis yet. Current positive indicators, such as growth of the gross domestic product, decrease of unemployment, decrease of the public and foreign debt are largely due to circumstances and positive surrounding, and not the economic policy. The fundamental problem of the Croatian economic policy is neglecting the industrial development. There was no transition of the Croatian old and socialist industry into a modern and market oriented industry. Non-existing industrial policy led to collapse of the existing one. In the industrial society that we live in, there is no development without the industrial development. Creating quality jobs starts with creating jobs in modern industries. Croatia does not have such approach nor such policy. The result of it is the lowest employment within EU countries and emigrations of the young generations which are not able to find jobs in Croatia. So economic problem – neglecting the industrial development with the decrease of birthrate has been becoming one of the main political problems – decrease of the population.