Preparation of strategic development programmes: is participation the right way?

If you want to run a successful regional policy you need to behave similar to the company manager: you need to have vision, mission, strategy and action plans. In Croatia, during the past 13 years, more than 100 official national and regional documents called "strategies", "programmes" or "plans" have been produced. Therefore, it would be reasonable to assume that Croatia has an extensive experience in the production of such documents. Nevertheless, in the last couple of years Croatia has and is still receiving international and financial assistance for the production of development projects. Why? Although many, too many strategic documents were produced, once when the supervisory body adopts such documents, they usually end up in somebody's draw and without any repercussion stay there. Through the international assistance a new, participative methodology in regional development planning was applied with three regional programmes as results. The first section of this paper briefly explains the old practice and distinctive features of the participative methodology. The major part of the paper is focusing on the analysis of the three pilot programmes: Island of Šolta, Town of Virovitica and Town of Samobor. The idea behind these analyses is the critical overview and evaluation of the participative methodology implementation successfulness regional development planning. Although the analysis indicate that there are certain objective as well as subjective obstacles for sound implementation of participative methodology, the three pilot programmes clearly mark the new approach to regional development planning in Croatia. The last section of the paper is providing recommendations for the participation methodology future improvement in regional planning. Key words: regional development, strategic planning, participative methodology

Comparative analysis of regional unemployment and RGDP in Croatia and selected transition countries

Most transition economies have experienced a prolonged periods of high unemployment rates and decline of the growth rates at the beginning of transition process. However, after the initial decline in the economic activity, a period of stronger growth rates was recorded in most of the transition countries. Many analyses were done on this initial phase of transition process so we are concentrating on more successful period of transition process. Through the analysis of a regional gross domestic product dynamics in Croatian regions and several other European Union Candidate Countries we are identifying common development patterns in selected countries. Furthermore, since the unemployment is severe problem in most of the transition countries in our sample, and the increasing employment is one of the goals of the European Union, we expect that this issue will receive greater attention in the future. Due to the fact that regional structural developments were not sufficiently analysed, at least not in Croatia, we hope that this comparative study will contribute to the existing literature. Previous studies confirm that the economic growth during the more successful phase of transition was not strong enough to help to clear the labour market in selected countries. But these results are predominately concentrated on the country, and not on the regional level. Therefore, we analyse regional development in order to identify whether there are common patterns in Croatian regions with regions in other transition countries. We also compare our set of indicators with those in the European Union regions, particularly those geographically closer to Croatia. The main obstacle to regional analysis in Croatia is the lack of adequate statistical data. Therefore, first part of our paper consists of generating the relevant indicators. Since the paper is oriented to analysis, we do not focus on methodological problems. We are, however, aware of the limitations imposed on the interpretations of our results due to the fact. Key words: RGDP, unemployment, comparative regional analysis. JEL Classification: R19, J69, R11.