Development of organizational forms of retail trade in the Republic of Croatia

In this paper, the author defines the organizational forms of retail trade (operating units, business entities and their associations, groups, alliances) and describes the specific characteristics of their formation. After that, changes in organizational forms of retail trade in the Republic of Croatia in the past two decades are analyzed on the basis of the accessible statistical data. Based on the presented data, the author tries to establish some regularities in this development – regularities that could be expressed through concepts such as: development of the international life cycles, the wheel of retail trade, dialectic process, etc.