What’s Kali’s secret?
As Morski writes on the 29th of January, 2018, according to the most recent analysis of the CROračun application, the most successful municipality in Dalmatia is Kali in Zadar County.
The municipalities in Istria, Zagorje and Međimurje, and the smaller towns in Croatia, seem to have found the best recipe for addressing the pressing unemployment problem. This has been derived from the latest analysis of the CROračun app, which works with interactive visualisation, integrating different types of data at the local unit level through the display and comparison of economic, budget, demographic and social indicators.
The most recent published calculations, for which the data of the Croatian Employment Service and the Croatian Pension Insurance Institute are sources, refer to the unemployment rate recorded in December 2017, compared to the same period a year earlier, for a total of 556 cities and municipalities in Croatia, as well as 21 counties, including the City of Zagreb.
Lupoglav is Istria’s best
The unemployment rate for December 2017 was 11.3 percent in Croatia, as opposed to 14.1 percent in the same month one year earlier. The number of employees, according to the application, grew by 2.4 percent, and the number of unemployed people decreased by 20.8 percent. Of the 556 municipalities and cities recorded, the lowest unemployment rate in the last month of last year was in the Lupoglav municipality in Istria, at only 2.4 percent, which is almost half less than in the same period of 2016 when it was at four percent, according to a report by Slobodna Dalmacija.
The first city with the lowest rate of unemployment also comes from the same county, which is Buzet (the third in total), where the unemployment rate is 2.6 percent, followed by Varaždin, Pazin, and Čakovec.
Among the counties, if we exclude the first on the list of the City of Zagreb (which has county status) where the unemployment rate is 4.8 percent, Varaždin County is first, where unemployment is at 5.4 percent. The worst situation can be found in the municipality of Šodolovci in Osijek-Baranja County, where the unemployment rate last year was as high as 86.6 percent back in December.
It’s worth mentioning that among the top ten municipalities and cities in the country with the lowest unemployment rate are the ones from Istria, Varaždin, Krapina-Zagorje and Medjimurje counties, which are among the best, as well as on the list of individual counties. Dalmatian counties are in the middle, as are several Slavonian ones, with Virovitica-Podravina (23.7 percent unemployment rate) and Sisak-Moslavina (24.3 percent) at the bottom.
In December 2017, the Kali municipality, with slightly more than 1,600 inhabitants, had an unemployment rate of less than the national average of 5.8 percent, and among the first hundred municipalities and towns in the country with the lowest unemployment rate, only about a dozen are from Dalmatia.
The lowest unemployment rate is in… Kali
Behind Kali is the City of Dubrovnik with a 6.5 percent unemployment rate, placing the Pearl of the Adriatic at 54th place on the total municipal and city scale, while among individual cities, it’s at 24th place, with 128 cities on that list.
Only the cities Zadar (7.2 percent) and Biograd na Mor (7.3 percent), are among the first hundred ”best” cities and municipalities with the lowest unemployment rate in Dalmatia, and when it comes to municipalities, Kijevo (7.4 percent), Bol (7.6 percent), Postira (8.4 percent), Preko (8.5 percent) and Brela (8.6 percent).
The municipality of Kali can primarily thank fisheries and mariculture for its relatively low unemployment rate, as a rather large percentage of fishing fleets for hunting blue fish are located in Kali. We have between 30 and 40 ships, and on every one there are ten sailors, so there are about 400 jobs there. Here “Kali Tuna”, can also be found, the biggest tuna breeder in Croatia, then “Cromaris” and others,” stated Kali’s Marko Kolega.
Tourism is said to be just waking up here, and the fact that more and more young people stay in Kali is a source of particular pride.
”Even though more people die here than are born, we’re happy to have 15 newborn babies every year. We also stimulate that, and for each child, we give 5,000 kuna, and for the third and for every next child, 30,000 kuna. We also provide scholarships for all students. Realistically, the tourist season lasts for only a short while, so we can’t live on it,” concluded Kolega.
