The aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of election victory in the Republic of Croatia. The main hypothesis of the paper is that in the Republic of Croatia the events of the 1990s, i.e., the Homeland War, had a stronger impact on the winners of the parliamentary elections in terms of the economic performance of the local self-government units (LSGs). Due to the availability of data, we focus on the 2016 parliamentary elections, and we model the victory of the two leading parties in Croatia – the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – at the level of LSG. We develop a logistic regression model with the variable "election victory" at the LSG level as a dependent variable explained by the following variables: economic development at the LSG level, Homeland War covered LSGs, transparency of LSG budgets, election turnout, and government budget support to the LSGs. The results show that certain commonly accepted opinions, such as that voters in more economically developed LSGs vote more for the SDP on average, and that voters in war-affected LSGs vote more for the HDZ on average, have empirical confirmation.

A side effect of economic globalisation and new information and communication technologies is the increasing fragmentation of the production process across different countries and continents, contributing to the rise of trade in intermediate goods, which has increased to almost 2/3 of total world trade. Most of this trade, i.e., intermediate goods, are transported by sea. Maritime trade is one of the most economical but also complex ways of trading and transporting goods, requiring good coordination, various stops and controls, transhipments, storage, ICT technology to track the cargo, etc. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to quantify the impact of trade facilitation on trade in intermediate goods on the sample of EU28 countries, using biennial data for the period 2010-2018. We estimate augmented gravity model on bilateral trade data using a Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator. Our results suggest that, as expected, logistics, and in particular ICT development, has a significant and positive effect on trade in intermediate inputs, when controlling for other variables in the gravity model such as GDP of trading partners, distance, contiguity, existence of a free trade agreement, exchange rate, and common cultural proxies. Our results support the global trend of development and investment in logistics, and, in particular, new ICT technologies, which can not only contribute to the continued growth of trade in intermediates, but also help mitigate the negative effects of recent global economic shocks.