In 2018, almost 37,000 babies were born in Croatia, almost 400 more than in 2017 — though hardly a big enough increase to be considered an upward trend, according to Bosnjak.

And 2017 was the worst year on record since 1960. Then, 76,156 babies were born in the republic.

Even in 1992, that is to say the year after the worst year of the war in Croatia, 46,970 births were recorded, a figure that presumably excludes most of those born in the then Serbian-breakaway areas.

Successive Croatian governments have tried to tackle the demographic problem but so far with no success.

A Demographic Revival Council was founded in 2017 to coordinate ministerial policies. A new strategy for halting and reversing Croatian decline is being prepared to replace a national population policy from 2006.

Bosnjak said huge sums were being invested in everything from kindergartens to agriculture, especially in areas that have been depopulating over the last quarter of a century, such as the east of the country.

While births and deaths can be tracked exactly, it is far harder to work out how many people are emigrating.

In 2018, the Croatian National Bank published a groundbreaking study that examined how many Croats had gone abroad by looking not at Croatian data but at statistics such as social security numbers in 10 core EU countries.

According to this, some 230,000 people went to those countries between 2013, when Croatia joined the EU, and 2016. Relatively few are believed to have gone elsewhere.

Both Ivanda and Bosnjak agreed with that ballpark figure, though there is debate about how many Croats who show up in statistics abroad are actually from Bosnia, since Bosnian Croats are eligible for Croatian passports. Some 20 per cent of Croats abroad are believed to be from Bosnia.

The Croatian National Bank study found that 71 per cent of those who had gone abroad were in Germany, eight per cent were in Austria and seven per cent in Ireland.

The numbers who have gone abroad permanently since Croatia joined the EU represent five per cent of its population. A large proportion of them are young, of child-bearing and of working age. Increasingly whole families have departed.

There is no significant immigration to Croatia. Of the roughly 10,000 a year who do come to live in the country, the largest proportion are Croats who have worked abroad who are now retiring and a small number of Bosnian Croats.

The government hopes that measures such as making pension contributions for mothers on maternity leave will help push the fertility rate back up to 1.6 in the next couple of years. But a big problem is the nature of women’s employment.

In Scandinavia, which has higher levels of fertility, women tend to work in good jobs in health care or education but in Croatia hundreds of thousands of women work in badly paid and insecure jobs in retail, Ivanda said.

If they go off to have a baby, the likelihood is that their jobs will not be there when they return, so many do not, especially after a first child.

The demographic problems faced by Croatia are shared by other countries in the region, Ivanda said.

“This is a new phenomenon and there is nowhere else in the world which has such a high emigration rate and such a persistent low fertility rate.”

This is a new phenomenon and there is nowhere else in the world which has such a high emigration rate and such a persistent low fertility rate.

In the past, however, major waves of emigration were offset by high birth rates. Croatia’s fertility rate slipped below the replacement rate way back in 1968, but in the period after that, being one of the richer parts of Yugoslavia, it attracted immigrants from the rest of the country.

The demographic crisis and emigration are already causing labour shortages in the seasonal tourism industry and in construction. This year, the government doubled the amount of work permits for foreigners to 63,900 compared with 39,000 in 2018.

In the past, many of these jobs were filled by workers from other parts of the (non-EU) former Yugoslavia but now, as Germany and others have opened their labour markets to them, they go there for well-paid, full-time jobs rather than poorly paid seasonal ones in Croatia.

In the longer term, even if a good proportion of those emigrating return, Croatia will still need immigration if it wants to reverse population decline.

A UN study predicts that Croatia’s population will fall to 3.46 million by 2050.