THE INFLUENCE OF LEASING ON THE CROATIAN COMMODITY EXCHANGE DEFICIT

Basic issues of this research are leasing relations and their impact on the Republic of Croatia foreign trade. It is a well-known fact that leasing is a very important strategic form of fi nancing and conquering world markets. Croatia is in recent times very interesting for foreign investors, especially if having in mind the fact that the Croatian Government, after the ownership transformation and change of economic system, chose global-liberal foreign trade as its policy, abandoning the protectionism and an import replacement strategy of the ex-state, in order to join the Euro-Atlantic Association as soon as possible. This policy, as well as the unfavorable economic and political situation in the last decade of the past century, has negatively affected the Republic of Croatia foreign trade, causing constant and almost continuously growing trade defi cit. In our opinion leasing operations contributed a lot to this situation. We shall try to verify this hypothesis in this paper.