Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Dieter Stiefel, Alice Teichova (Hrsg.): Sonderband 9. „Zarte Bande” – Österreich und die europäischen planwirtschaftlichen Länder / „Delicate Relationships” – Austria and Europe’s Planned Economies (2006)
Damir Jelic: “Living in the neighbourhood” - Economic Relations between Capitalist Austria and Socialist Croatia in Historical Perspective
“Living in the neighbourhood Austrian tourists represented a significant and very stable share of all tourist groups in socialist Croatia. This leads to thinking about the balance of payments between Austria and Croatia as well as about the relation between Croatian shoppers in Austria and Austrian tourists spending money in Croatia. Chart 6: National structure of foreign tourists in Croatia Calculations based on data from Statistical Yearbook Yugoslavia 1918-1988 Vienna - the biggest socialist trading house During the era of socialism, Austria was able to exploit its favourable strategic position, being situated on the border between the capitalist and the socialist world. Personal contacts, its geographical position and a favourable cultural and legal environment attracted numerous merchants, intermediates and subsidiary offices of big businesses from both the west and the east. Most big industries or trade houses had their branches or affiliated companies in Vienna. For socialist enterprises, Vienna branches or affiliated companies (even more so) posed a perfect opportunity to export some parts of their profits to Austria in order to launder money for high-level directors and tradesmen of big socialist companies. In addition, big enterprises which were part of a strictly regulated administrative economy needed an independent less controlled unit in order to resolve some of their everyday business problems more easily.29 Wherever a company did business with different socialist countries, it was organised through some of the numerous Vienna companies which quite often played the role of an intermediary. 1 recall my professor who worked in the chemical industry. She had to ask for import permission from Belgrade for a few kilograms of some special ink he needed. The director of the branch in Vienna resolved many problems of that kind. 263
