July the 29th, 2021 - The government introduced job preservation measures in an attempt to tackle the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic and all of the related lockdowns throughout 2020. When it comes to micro and small Croatian enterprises, the amounts paid out to keep their heads above water are generous indeed.
As Jadranka Dozan/Poslovni Dnevnik writes, according to the daily "barometer" of the Croatian Employment Service (CES), there are currently 126,175 unemployed persons officially registered as such across Croatia, which is slightly less than were officially registered back at the beginning of the month.
The latest available data from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and the Croatian Pension Insurance Institute for the month of June this year confirmed this positive continuation of employment growth.
According to the CBS, there were a total of 1.56 million employees across Croatia in the middle of the year, and the number of insured persons reached 1.6 million, recording the fourth month of consecutive growth when compared to last year.
In addition to domestic economic recovery, these developments are also influenced by the aforementioned measures to preserve jobs (ORM) introduced shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. From last March to the end of May this year, 11.05 billion kuna in aid for was paid out to companies.
Of that amount - and in addition to co-financing the payment of salaries, the measure of compensation of fixed costs introduced at the end of last year has also been included - standing at 8.24 billion kuna which was paid last year, and 2.81 billion kuna which was paid out during the first five months of this year. Most of the money from these measures in the past 15 months, about 5.3 billion kuna of it, was directed to micro Croatian enterprises (with up to 10 employees), and a further 20 percent ended up going to small Croatian enteprises (which have between 11 and 50 employees).
As opposed to small Croatian enterprises, for the purpose of preserving jobs, less than 1.8 billion kuna was diverted to medium and large enterprises. Both the amount and the number of workers covered by these measures are now gradually decreasing.
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