The power of Perception

After years of negotiations, towards the end of January a referendum on EU membership was held in Croatia in which 67 pct voted in favour. With this final hurdle cleared, the country is now set to accede to the EU on July 1st, 2013. If it's possible to cast our minds back to previous waves of EU accession (it was eight years ago that the Visegrád countries and the Baltics joined, followed two years later by Romania and Bulgaria), the new countries and their real estate markets immediately benefitted from a massive investment boom, coupled with soaring property prices. The question that naturally arises is whether something similar is going to happen in Croatia. The Adriatic country, however, is joining in a rather different climate and set of circumstances. To boom or not to boom?Maruška Vizek, a research associate at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, is firmly of the view that the boom in investment and prices is not going to be repeated: "We are not likely to see t