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Comment by kebman | Hacker News Reader

I first discovered Croatia when it was called Yugoslavia. Yes, it's an extremely beautiful country. But the area also has systemic problems that to me seems to be political in nature. Well, perhaps not all. Some of it is also simply economic. For good or bad, that leads to cheap prices on everything, which is the real reason so many people come, despite its charm. I'm sure that can be alleviated with with and good leadership, however. And where there's income, it's also worth investing in infrastructure.

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While I complain about overbearing tourist season, the reality is that if you avoid popular tourist places in July and August Croatia can be a pretty great place to live, especially for us software developers that can remote.

Working as a small business freelancer (<1M Euro income/year) gets you around 70% net income (this is with healthcare and minimal retirement plan payments and without accounting and doing stuff like justifying expenses etc. which drives that much further with VAT returns). Public healthcare is inconsistent at best, but there is a healthy industry of medical tourism built for western Europeans that's easily affordable on a normal freelancer income. Likewise private childcare, schools, etc. all available and affordable. And all those beautiful places are still around and nice other 10 months a year. You can easily afford multiple properties and a comfortable lifestyle.

I spent a decent amount of time into looking for alternative places I could live in EU but really nothing looks that interesting, Spain looked attractive until I saw the taxes (and their public system is not worth that kind of money), western Europe is expensive and I would get very minimal increase in income by moving there (programming is not well paid) so I can realistically have a better standard of living here.

> I'm sure that can be alleviated with with and good leadership, however.

I very much doubt it - one of the reasons we are in this mess is some 80+ years of human capital devastation - we have nowhere to draw experts or leaders from anymore.

Hm, that's very sad to hear... What would you do about it?

Remove inefficient governments, privatise all public services, let the market clean up the mess and attract foreign capital through zero taxation and lack of regulations.

You need rich foreign expats, tired of paying 50% of their salaries in exchange for run down cities and homelessness, creating value in the country.

If tourism is your only strategy you won't go far.

> privatise all public services, let the market clean up the mess

Half-Croat here. What you propose would destroy what is left of the country. Public services are already shoddy as it is because Croatia doesn't have much economy outside of tourism, agriculture and a bit of heavy industry. The best and young minds have been leaving the country for well over half a century.

I really love Croatia, it's a beautiful country, but I don't want to deal with the Croatian government.

If conditions were more fiscally favourable, if there were better private schools, an english speaking expat community, I'd definitely move there.

I think Montenegro is doing pretty good in that regard. Taxation is straightforward and reasonable. That attracted private capital. Good private schools started popping out, the Tivat marina was built. It's also the first country to be in line to join the EU - which is not something I consider positive, but it's certainly a sign of the quality of the country.

Sadly Croatia is still not there and, frankly, I doubt it's going to get there anytime soon. Croatia is like a poorer version of countries in the EU: high and complex taxes, which get converted into mediocre services after passing through an inefficient government. The only difference is that European countries are richer and therefore the services are marginally better, even if they're getting worse and worse over time.

I understand my anarchist solution can be seen as radical and it's not going to happen, but even moving in that direction would be helpful.

Sadly, nothing. Even if we were to elect a capable government, there would still be a large segment of the population that would resist any change as long as it conflicts with their economic interests.

I'm afraid we're talking into a societal, environmental and cultural catastrophe and that nothing will change until it's too late.

My cousins who were college educated in Zagreb or Split are finding work in Germany. The brain drain is real. I can't help but think that balkanization seriously killed the economy there and nipped in the bud any hope of strong private industries investing and establishing themselves in such a tiny place. More Croatians live in Germany than Croatia today, because Germany did the opposite and unified, and brought on economic stability it continues to enjoy, rather than fractured after the iron curtain fell.

Balkanization had nothing to do with it - the problem was that communism valued loyalty over ability and promoted people according to that principle. After Yugoslavia fell apart, the new political parties, both ruling and opposition, simply changed colors while maintaining the same patterns of behavior.

I don't know, balkanization today is widely seen as a mistake that economically weakened the region. Consider how that would look for the U.S. California has the 5th largest GDP in the world if it were its own country. Louisiana on the other hand would quickly turn into a backwater, as it is a net recipient of federal support and California is a net provider. When you look at the states of the former Yugoslavia, you see the exact same effect, because these states drawn along old historical lines did not have equivalent economic outputs, and areas that generated more resources for the state subsidized other areas. Today, Slovenia is doing well, Bosnia is falling behind. They aren't even all in the EU.

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