Croatia’s labour market to undergo major changes

A study was presented at a Conference on the Future of the Labour Market in Zagreb today, which shows that almost 97 thousand jobs in Croatia will undergo major changes by 2030. These changes primarily deal with automation leading to redundancies.

Speaking at the conference the State Secretary at the Labour and Pension System, Family and Social Policy Ministry, Ivan Vidiš, said that the ministry is working to responding accordingly to this, first and foremost, through the measures of the active employment policy: “Our workers will need additional support in refreshing their skill set. On April 1st we launched our voucher system, and through this system, we noted today about the include about thirty thousand people, who need to refresh their skills in terms of digitization and green transition on our labour market.”

The president of the Management Board of the Rasco utility equipment factory Ivan Franičević had this to say about the existing problems on the Croatian labour market: “There are two visible trends on the labour market, a significant deficit in workers and the problem of structural unemployment. There are more than 100 thousand unemployed people whose skills do not meet the current needs of the market. On the other hand there is a growing trend of automation, which will force a certain number of people into unemployment. The economy is responding to this by importing workers and accelerating the automation process.”

Meanwhile, due to the war in Ukraine, the consequences of which are being felt by the countries through central Europe, the World Bank has lowered its growth forecast for the Croatian economy this year and in 2023. According to its updated estimate, the Croatian economy should grow by 3.8 percent this year, which is 1.6 percentage points lower than the bank had initially forecast. The World Bank's forecast for next year was lowered by one percentage point, to 3.4 percent. It remains to be seen how this, coupled with rampant inflation and the projected changes on the labour market, will affect the living standard in Croatia.

Source: HRT