The author considers the individual cultural characteristics of the Croats in a historical retrospective from the point of view of their influence on the economic growth and development of the country. In this article, the vision of the reasons that the promotion of the ideas of liberal capitalism and the “homo oeconomicus” model of behavior in modern Croatia in the zone of the country's entry into the Eurozone and the European Union did not lead to an improvement in the well-being of the population presented in terms of cultural anthropology. Using the example of the factor of religious identity, the author makes an expert comparative analysis of the situation in Croatia with the situation in other Catholic and Orthodox countries, as well as in countries where the Protestant world view has spread. The paper concludes that it is necessary to take into account cultural and ethnological peculiarities of the people when transferring any globalization tendencies to the national economic system and the fundamental role of the cultural code for perceiving any values, including values of liberal capitalism. According to the author, the key to solving the problem of the development of Croatia lies in the field of fundamental anthropology of economics as an all-inclusive humanistic, social and natural science.