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The main goal of this policy paper is to provide an overview of the basic problems that have impact on healthcare in Croatia and tend to make it unsustainable. The paper points out that the COVID-19 crisis has deepened and exacerbated the already existing problems of financing the health system. The analysis shows that Croatia swept under the rug systemic problems in financing healthcare and ultimately paid the price through frequent financial bailouts. Thus, in the period from 1994-2021, a total of HRK 23.9 billion was spent on bailing out the health service. On the other hand, the COVID-19 crisis can be seen as a chance to start solving the problem and implement certain reforms, both on the revenue and expenditure side of the health system.

Fiscal rules are among the cornerstones of macroeconomic policies in the European Union, both on the national and the supranational level. The importance of enacting and conducting the fiscal rules has become apparent after the expansion of public debts and budget deficits in the period of the global financial crisis. Besides the supranational rules, governments impose national fiscal rules in order to fulfill the convergence criteria for public debt and the budget deficit. Still, there is an open question on their influence on other economic parameters. This paper examines contextual variables that influenced the efficiency of implementing fiscal rules in 28 European Union countries. We observe the period of the last financial crisis and its aftermath when most of the countries introduced new or adjusted existing national fiscal rules, using two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The main goal of the paper is to study the impact of contextual variables on fiscal rules’ efficiency scores. In the first stage, we specify the DEA model to estimate the relative efficiency for each observed country in each year in the period from 2008 to 2016. After that, in the second stage, the efficiency scores are regressed on several contextual variables to observe the factors that explicate the variation in DEA-efficiency.

Actual economic crisis initiated numerous debates on fiscal policy of the European Union (EU) and unrealistic convergence demands placed upon the Member States, where the emphasis is on fiscal criteria: The budget deficit should not exceed 3% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the public debt must be less than 60% of GDP. The aim of this article is to analyze the impact of the crisis on fiscal variables in selected European countries and to examine the efficacy of conducted reforms through comparing forecasted values, obtained by the least absolute deviation method, with actual values. Analyzed countries are Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain, and the Republic of Croatia, the EU countries that were the most exposed to the impact of the crisis and have problems with economic instability. Values were forecasted on the quarter basis for the period 2015 and 2016 using data from 2000 until 2014, and the results show that the proposed method is useful in predicting under unchanged conditions. This leads to the conclusion that analyzed countries did not carry out all the necessary reforms.