Europe has several layers, and some are closer to the core than others. Just what can Croatia learn from the United Kingdom when it comes to employment and the economy?
The latest figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics are in, as of last Friday, it seems the Republic of Croatia has 181,179 people officially registered as unemployed.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes on the 26th of March, 2018, while Croatia is struggling with disadvantageous relation to the total number of employed persons in terms of the number of retirees and residents, the United Kingdom, representing an entirely different face of Europe, is one of the countries with the highest level of overall employment not only on the European continent, but in the world and, in particular, very high youth employment.
While the United Kingdom might seem like the land of milk and honey to many a naive eye, having been raised there myself, I can state, as the song itself goes, ''it's not like the movies''. There are a great many parts of the United Kingdom, Northern England in particular, which suffer immensely with what appears to many natives to be continued economic stagnation, with a huge portion of certain populations in certain areas relying almost solely on welfare and the relatively generous benefit system the UK has in place, which is sadly abused by some.
With all that being said, and all of it being painfully true, Blighty somehow manages to come out on top time and time again, eventually anyway, and there are certainly a great many lessons this Northern European island gem can teach Croatia when it comes to how to ''get things going again'', at least in the economic sense, but I won't be doing any dances of hope and glee in that respect either, at least not until this Brexit nightmare is dealt with.
Despite its problems (and there are many, believe me), Britain has always been an extremely strong nation both politically and economically, and has an almost global reach with a record high employment rate of almost 75.2 percent, and a record low unemployment of 4.4 percent. Unlike the beer swilling, pie loving island just off France, Croatia has an official unemployment figure of 12.2 percent, as was officially recorded at the tail end of last year.
The latest data from the Central Bureau of Statistics shows that Croatia has 181,179 persons registered as unemployed, and Eurostat estimates that for the first quarter of this year, the unemployment rate in Croatia fell below 10 percent. Of course, in Brussels, they're very much aware that unemployment statistics in this country are greatly affected by the tourist season and significant labour emigration from Croatia to other EU countries, the UK and Ireland being two targets in particular.
While the total unemployment rate doesn't really drastically change among the 28 EU member states, the situation with youth unemployment is worrying in all the Mediterranean countries owing to the ''flexible'' seasonal trends, and Croatia, much like Greece and Spain, isn't an exception to at least what appears to be an apparently eternal issue.
While unemployment at the EU level is 16.1% for young people aged 15 to 24, in the United Kingdom it stands at 12.4%, and in Croatia it's a concerning 24.5%. It isn't really a comforting factor that countries such as Italy are behind us on this issue at 31.5 percent, Spain with 36 percent, and Greece with an extremely uninspiring 43.7 percent youth unemployment.
In order to help Croatia with its example and vast experience, at the end of last week, representatives from the British Department of Work and Pensions were in Zagreb, and a roundtable on youth employment and labour market participation was held.
The event was organised by their Croatian counterparts, the British Embassy in Zagreb, and Chevening Alumni Croatia - a Croatian association of 350 former British Government scholarships. Former Chevening scholar Marko Pavić is the head of this association. It is therefore to be expected, as the he himself pointed out, that the best British practice for youth inclusion in the labour market will be used. Iain Walsh told how great progress has been made in the education and regulatory system in the past twenty years, so that more young people, especially those who are not in the education system, are better included in the labour market.
Lifelong education
"We've created a complex structure that enables lifelong education to people at all levels of their current qualifications, especially those who are without qualifications at all. The fact is that education for people with low or no qualifications must be short and consistent with simultaneous job searching. The statistics show that six out of ten long-term unemployed people on the labour market have problems with English-language literacy and as many as nine out of ten have issues with basic accounting,'' Walsh stated, adding that the situation was not perfect either and that there are many problems to solve. A point worth really listening to.
Marko Pavić pointed out that like Britain, Croatia has also made great progress in reducing unemployment, especially youth unemployment.
It's not Croatia's specificity
"The fact is that we've got major problems with leaving our labour force abroad, but that isn't a Croatian specificity. I recently visited Bulgaria where they explained that before the 1st of January 2007, that country had 10 million inhabitants, and today there's about 7.5 million, and Poland has a much larger problem, Poland has lost almost six percent of its 40 million inhabitants,'' Pavić noted.
He explained that Croatia, owing in a large part to the European funds, halved its youth unemployment by 2013 when it was at an alarming 50 percent, and it had dropped to 22 percent by the end of 2017.
"Croatia has the third largest growth in employment rate in the European Union, it was at 3.8 percent in 2017. In the last quarter, there were almost 60 thousand workers more than there were during the same period of the year before, with 193,967 people on average in the records for 2017. The share of young people, aged from 15 to 24 years old, was 15.2 percent, and in the age group of 25 to 29, 11.5 percent,'' he concluded.
