Last year, more than 20 percent of workers in Croatia worked on a temporary employment contract, which is a significantly higher share compared to the EU average of 14.3 percent, according to data released by Eurostat, the EU statistics bureau.

This means that 27 million employees aged 15 to 64 in the EU had a temporary contract in 2017. The proportion was slightly higher for women (14.8 percent) than for men (13.8 percent). It was also higher in the euro zone countries (16.0 percent) compared to EU28.

However, discrepancies were observed in the frequency of temporary work contracts across EU member states, and different age groups.

Over a quarter of employees in Spain (26.8 percent) and Poland (26.1 percent), and over a fifth in Portugal (22.0 percent), the Netherlands (21.5 percent) and Croatia (20.6 percent) worked on a temporary contract in 2017.

At the opposite end of the scale, temporary employees accounted for less than 2 percent of all employees in Romania (1.2 percent) and Lithuania (1.7 percent). Low share of temporary contract employees were also recorded in Latvia (3.0 percent), Estonia (3.1 percent), Bulgaria (4.4 percent), Malta, and the United Kingdom (5.6 percent each).

By age group, young workers held by far the highest share of temporary contracts. Last year in the EU, nearly 8 million youths, or almost half (43.9 percent) of all employees aged 15 to 24, were hired on a temporary contract.

Across EU countries, nearly three quarters of all young employees had a temporary contract in Spain (73.3 percent) and Slovenia (71.6 percent). Around two thirds of them in Poland (68.2 percent) and Portugal (65.9 percent), and more than half in Italy (61.9 percent), Croatia (60.8 percent) and France (58.0 percent) worked on temporary contracts.

In contrast, the countries with the lowest share of young workers on fixed-term contracts were in Romania (4.1 percent), Latvia (6.7 percent) and Lithuania (6.8 percent). In addition, their share was under 20 percent in Estonia (10.6 percent), Bulgaria (12.7 percent), Malta (13.0 percent), the United Kingdom (14.5 percent) and Hungary (17.6 percent).

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