As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Brnic writes, in the very first year of the Croatian national pension’s application, otherwise known as the national benefit for the elderly, failed quite catastrophically in resulting in what was expected by the government.
This has been shown by the analysis of experts from the Institute of Public Finance (IJF), who determined from HZMO (Croatian Pension Institute) that when looking at data from the end of November, only 5,658 beneficiaries received their payments of 800 kuna per month. There are many factors which point to just why it failed so miserably.
When the law on the so-called Croatian national pension was passed, which has been in force since the beginning of 2021, it was estimated that out of about 60,000 people who did not meet the minimum pension requirements, 19.7 thousand senior citizens could meet the criteria for receiving benefits this year, costing the state budget around 132 million kuna in total.
Given the shortfall in the number of beneficiaries by the end of November, only a third of that amount was used to pay out those benefits.
A lack of information provided to the target population about many of its (typically Croatian) complex application processes, including the fact that some of those entitled to the benefit are located in remote places without access to banks or even ATMs are cited as highly possible reasons for the failure of the Croatian national pension idea, at least according to senior IJF analysts.
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