The Croatian government on Thursday endorsed a draft strategy for managing state-owned property in Croatia from 2013 to 2017 and the document covers all forms of state ownership.
According to Eurostat calculation methods, Croatia has one of the highest government-owned property and assets rates in Europe, ranking fifth after Norway, Finland, Iceland and Sweden, Deputy Prime Minister Neven Mimica said.
The value of Croatia's state-owned property is put at 31 billion euros, but those assets are poorly managed and insufficient income has been gained from it, according to Mimica.
For instance, Sweden and Finland earn between 2% and 4% of its GDP from state-owned property annually while Croatia obtains only 0.7% of its GDP from state-owned assets, he added.
He stressed that the strategy did not stipulate the sale and privatisation of national resources or of companies of strategic interest.
The document envisages the sale of the government's interest in more than 400 companies in which the state has a small share.
As for real estate, the ownership over 40 million square metres has so far been transferred from the central government to units of local authorities, but little use has been made of it, according to Mimica who mentioned business zones with no significant success.
Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said that the strategy was the government's best answer to the criticism from the Opposition in parliament that his cabinet was planning to sell assets without a prior strategy.
The proposed strategy recommends the introduction of an integral model of managing such assets in Croatia to make better use of the government-owned property.
According to the draft, the government had an interest in a total of 631 companies in mid-March 2013, and the government's share in 555 of them was up to 49.99%, while the state interest in 61 companies was above 50% of those companies' capital.
