The statistics office said said on Friday year-on-year GDP growth amounted to 2.9 percent in the first quarter versus 2.4 percent in the last quarter of 2014.

The growth was boosted by investment, which rose by 11.8 percent and by exports which were up 5.4 percent year-on-year.

"The growth figures are very positive and indicate that Slovenia's GDP growth this year could be above 3 percent," said Marko Rozman, head of investment at the treasury of Dezelna Banka.

The government in March forecast GDP growth of 2.4 percent this year, versus growth of 2.6 percent in 2014. The Bank of Slovenia sees this year's growth at 2.2 percent.

Rozman said growth was likely to speed up in the coming quarters due to high liquidity in the euro zone, on account of the European Central Bank's quantitative easing programme. The programme is expected to continue at least till September 2016 and was designed to raise euro zone inflation.

The statistics office also said inflation in Slovenia remained negative at 0.8 percent year-on-year in May, mainly on account of lower prices of oil products.

The government's macroeconomic institute UMAR said it expected the fall of prices to ease over the coming months and next year so that Slovenia would have a small inflation in 2016 due to an increase in household spending.

Slovenia was badly hit by the global crisis which started in 2008 due to its dependency on exports and managed to avoid only narrowly an international bailout for its troubled banks in 2013.

The government expects that growth will enable it to reduce the budget deficit to below 3 percent of GDP this year, as required by the European Commission, from 4.9 percent in 2014.