Unemployment is the major economic problem in Croatia.
New measures to boost employment will bring first effects at the end of this year and will lead to increased employment, said on Friday Tomislav Ćorić, Minister of Labour and Pension System, after meeting with representatives of town and municipalities of the Karlovac County, reports politikaplus.com on January 27, 2017.
Ćorić told reporters that had the an opportunity to discuss employment problems, adding that the county had relatively low unemployment levels. He also talked about changes to the measures of active employment policy in his ministry.
Nine new employment measures are expected to be presented by March. “Taking into account the fact that everybody expects concrete measures and that there is a pressing need for the simplification of existing measures, I expect that starting from March, when we will present the nine measures, and until the end of this year we will witness an increased absorption of measures and results with regards to a decrease in unemployment number, as well as an increase in the number of employed persons”, said Ćorić.
He stressed that the Ministry had devoted the past few months to an analysis of existing measures, and that their number had been reduced. “We have decided to reduce the number of individual measures, but at the same time we have expanded their scope. Our focus will be on measures of professional training without full-time employment, and also on the vocational training of young people and the long-term unemployed people over 50 years of age”, said the Minister. He added that the package of nine measures will include options for virtually all unemployed to find a suitable solution which will enable them to enter the labour market.
All these measures, he said, should improve the competencies of the unemployed, which should ultimately lead to imbalances which exist in the labour market to be corrected. As an example, Ćorić said that one of the imbalances is the fact that there are 243,000 people registered as unemployed, but there are only 16,000 vacancies reported. “Unfortunately, there is clearly an imbalance between supply and demand, and in the coming period we will insist for the imbalance to be reduced, so that we would have on the market enough qualified people to satisfy the needs of employers”, he said.
Asked when he expected the first effects of measures which are to be presented in March, the Minister replied that the reduction in unemployment started two years ago, but that the further reduction of unemployment, as a consequence of new measures, should take place by the end of this year.
