May 19, 2021 - Held in Bucharest, Romania, the European Conference For Social Work Research saw Croatian and Swiss scientists jointly participate in scientific issues of social work in Croatia and Switzerland.

Earlier in May, the University of Bucharest, located after the biggest city and capital of Romania, held an online edition of the European Conference For Social Work Research (ECSWR).
Swiss and Croatian teams jointly participated in the symposium „Opportunities and Obstacles in the Evaluation of Homelessness from a Lifeworld-oriented International Social Work Perspective“, which saw prof. Matthias Drilling and dr. Zsolt Temesvary represent their University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), and dr. Lynette Šikić Mićanović represent the Croatian Ivo Pilar Social Research Institute. The conference was organized by The European Social Work Research Association (ESWRA)

As stated by ESWRA's official website, the association was founded in 2014 with a goal to create social work research development, collaboration, and exchange across Europe. As the ECSWR conference saw overwhelming levels of engagement, the ESWRA association today counts 600 members from across more than 33 countries.

„ESWRA’s vision is to take forward the development, practice, and utilization of social work research to enhance knowledge about individual and social problems, and to promote just and equitable societies“, says ESWRA.

While Dr. Lynette Šikić Mićanović presented Croatia at the conference, she is also a member of the team that includes Suzana Sakić and Paula Greiner. Along with the aforementioned Swiss team, the Ivo Pilar Social Research Institute informed that the Croatian team participated in a joint research project called "Exploring Homelessness and Pathways to Social Inclusion: A Comparative Study of Contexts and Challenges in Swiss and Croatian Cities (No. IZHRZO_180631/1).

„This work is financed within the Croatian-Swiss Research Program of the Croatian Science Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation with funds obtained from the Swiss-Croatian Cooperation Program”, says the Ivo Pilar Social Research Institute on its website.

Looking at the „Homelessness and Social Exclusion in Croatia“ science paper whose author is Lynette Šikić-Mićanović from 2010, its abstract suggests that „homelessness is a relatively new phenomenon in most Croatian cities and has been largely ignored by policymakers and social scientists“. So, Šikić-Mičanović's paper aimed to research and contribute new data on a previously unresearched social group to answer the urgent need for a fuller understanding of the perceptions and experiences of homeless people in Croatia.

„Based on the research findings of this study, a number of recommendations can be made for the provision of comprehensive information, services, and assistance to lessen social exclusion among homeless persons as well as to facilitate their routes out of homelessness“, says the paper. Based on scientific research, there are overall five recommendations, as follows:
1.) Special attention – apart from accommodation – needs to be paid to the quality (or lack) of services that homeless people urgently require, such as medical, counseling, legal, supportive holistic assistance from professional qualified and sensitised staff, and so on.
2.) Continual and systematic evaluation is required at shelters and among the wider homeless population by teams of qualified persons, researchers, and/or non-governmental organisations for the assessment and articulation of their needs, abilities, aspirations, and problems.
3.) Programmes need to be developed at the local level to meet different contextual needs. These could include more accessible (less public) soup kitchens, perhaps with special menus (e.g., for diabetics); the introduction of public bathhouses, day centres, doctor’s/dentist’s surgery, or subsidised accommodation for homeless persons, depending on the context.
4.) Volunteers from all age groups should be found and trained with a view to increasing public awareness of homelessness and social exclusion and dispelling the myths and stereotypes about homeless people.
5.) Former shelter users should be monitored and assisted with accommodation and other support services (e.g., utility bills, furniture, therapy, financial aid, help with education) to prevent them from becoming homeless again.

These recommendations are directly quoted from the scientific paper for the sake of accuracy, and hopefully, for a better tomorrow, the policies of the state will follow the scientific findings and discoveries in social sciences.

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The problem of emigration in Croatia has been further underlined by weak economic indicators, after Bulgaria, Croatia is the most underdeveloped country in the EU, explains economist Zdeslav Šantić.

As Tomislav Pili/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 14th of April, 2019, bringing Croatian average salaries closer to the average salaries of Western Europe, and strengthening institutions, are major factors which could significantly reduce the outflow of people from Croatia to work overseas, according to a study by the Brussels think tank, Centre for Economic and Political Studies (CEPS), which was published last week.

In a piece of research entitled "Mobile Workers of the European Union: A Challenge for Public Finance?" authors Cinzia Alcidi and Daniel Gros discuss current trends in labour mobility within the European Union, and the challenges faced by the countries from which such a workforce leaves.

The research suggests that in the last ten years, the mobility of workers has increased considerably in the EU. While in 2007 only 2.5 percent of workers had left their home countries, in 2017, the share of the mobile working population of the European Union grew to 3.8 percent. Increasing the mobility of European workers is the result of two factors, states CEPS. The first is the enlargement of the EU to the east having occurred in two waves, and mobility has increased much more, especially after the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU back in 2007. Apart from the east-west direction, recent years have seen more labour force mobility from the southern EU member states to the north, due to debt crisis and unemployment growth.

The latest data referenced by CEPS shows that Romania, Lithuania and Croatia have the highest share of workforce abroad, far above the European average. Nearly 20 percent of Romanian citizens earn their money in other EU member states, in Lithuania it is 14.8 percent, and in Croatia, 13.9 percent. For Croatian economists, such data doesn't really come as a surprise.

"Increasing emigration over the last few years was expected, and the experience of other new EU member states has shown that after EU accession and the labour market opening, emigration strongly increased, and in Croatia, the problem of emigration is further underlined by weak [domestic] economic indicators.

Croatia had one of the longest recessions in Europe, lasting six years in total. At the same time, even after recovery began, the growth dynamics remained insufficient in bringing Croatia closer to the EU's economic growth. Today, Croatia, after Bulgaria, is the least developed country,'' says OTP banka's economist Zdeslav Šantić.

"The accelerated outflow of the working-age population is particularly evident with the opening up of [Croatia's access to] the single European market since 2013, which was further strengthened by the deep recession in Croatia. However, with the exit from the migrant crisis, emigration from Croatia, especially among the working-age population, has not diminished but accelerated. Migration motives can be different - from differences in incomes, to employment opportunities, to structural factors,'' emphasised Zrinka Živković Matijević, an analyst from RBA.

"The very last factors - a weak institutional environment and (unfavourable) expectations of future economic prosperity (quality of education, satisfaction and trust in politics, future opportunities for generations to come) - are the most common motives for migration of citizens of a particular state who have a higher level of education. In that context, it isn't surprising that the countries which the most emigration are those with the lowest social progress index.

Regarding the convergence of wages, the fact is that at the very beginning of the transition process, Croatia had a high exchange rate, ie, a higher level of wage adjustment with the EU compared to other new members, following only Slovenia, the RBA analyst said.

"Meanwhile, the pace of wage growth and the standard of measured purchasing power parity in other countries has increased considerably since 2004, while GDP measured by the purchasing power parity in relation to the EU 28 average remains at approximately the same level (around 60 percent of the EU average), stagnant or comparatively behind,'' explained Živković Matijević.

Unfortunately, in Croatia, the problem of emigration is not a consequence of current economic trends, Šantić added, saying that the high perception of corruption and nepotism, inefficient state institutions, the huge importance the state carries in overall economic trends and the lack of transparency in the public sector further encourage young people to leave.

"When talking about the emigration of young people, it's worth mentioning that there's a lack of a housing care strategy. There's no regulated rental market yet, but young people have only the option of buying property through multi-year borrowing, and government measures are aimed solely at boosting property purchases,''

An interesting detail in the CEPS survey is the share of faculty-educated mobile workers. Although the usual theory often claims that those who find it the "easiest to leave'' are the highly educated, research shows that this is not the case, especially in the case of new EU members such as Croatia.

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Click here for the original article by Tomislav Pili for Poslovni Dnevnik