ZAGREB, October 5, 2018 – The government intends to have contracts concluded on 60% of the funds in the EU envelope for Croatia by the end of this year, and the envisaged allocation for Croatia is 10.7 billion euro, Regional Development and EU Funds Minister Gabrijela Žalac said in Šibenik on Friday.
She said that the ratio of available funds and those covered by concluded contracts stood at 9% before this government took office and now the contracting ratio is 54%.
“We have sped up the utilisation of EU funds and more than 75% of the allocation has been put at the disposal through tenders. We are still lagging behind, but we are speedily catching up with other member-states,” the minister said at the “Days of Regional Development and EU Funds” conference, organised by the Ministry of Regional Development and EU Funds in the central Adriatic city of Šibenik.
She says that all stakeholders, including local authorities and the government, play important roles in that process.
She also announced the strengthening of administrative capacities of units of local government where no money has been absorbed from EU funds in the past four years.
According to some estimates, we are short of 2,700 experts for those jobs on the ground, and the government has made a decision on employment, and if we want to increase absorption of EU funds tenfold, then we need personnel for that, Žalac said.
