In 2012, a negative economic growth was registered in Croatia (-2%), as well as in Slovenia (-2%), Hungary (-1.7%) and the Czech Republic (-1.1%).

On the other hand, Baltic countries saw a rise in their Gross Domestic Product: Latvia (+5.3%), Lithuania (+3.6%) and Estonia (+3.2%).

Both Poland and Slovakia experienced a rise of 2% in their respective GDP, Bulgaria (+0.8%) and Romania (+0.2%).

The countries with a pronounced GDP rise could ascribe those trends both to the external demand as well as to domestic demand, while the slowdown in other countries was a result of a weakening domestic demand, according to HNB analysts.

As for employment trends, a number of employed people mildly rose year on year in the first three quarters of 2012 in the Baltic countries as well as in Hungary and Romania.

Croatia saw the strongest decline in the number of those who got jobs.

Also, in Croatia survey unemployment rates were the highest in Q1, Q2 and Q3 in 2012, compared to the other countries covered by the HNB bulletin.

For the entire 2012, Croatia's survey unemployment rate was 15.8% according to the International Labour Organisation's methodology, while it soared to 18% according to the Eurostat statistics.

High jobless rates were reported in Latvia, 14.3% in December 2012, and in Slovakia 14.5%, while the Czech Republic had the lowest rate of 7.2%, according to Eurostat.

A majority of the countries covered by the bulletin continued to conduct fiscal consolidation in Q1, Q2 and Q3 in 2012, which they launched in 2010. The fiscal consolidation was mainly conducted through the reduction of budget expenditure, such as cuts in social benefits and capital transfers.

However, Croatia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic reduced the budgetary gaps through an increase in budget revenues, according to HNB analysts.

The public debt in many of those countries continued growing, and Croatia's public debt reached 53.6% of GDP last year.