Around 14 percent Croatians of working age (20-64) resided in another EU state in 2017, which is the third highest percentage in the EU, data published by Eurostat on Tuesday showed.

In 2017, the employment rate of mobile Croats was significantly higher than the employment rate of those who stayed in Croatia, 79.8 percent compared to 63 percent, Eurostat said.

On the EU level, 3.8 percent workers resided in another member state, with tertiary graduates more mobile than the rest of the population. Some 32 percent of mobile EU workers were highly educated, while the share of the overall EU population with tertiary education is around 30 percent.

The most mobile in the EU in 2017 were Romanians, where nationals of working age residing abroad accounted for 19.7 percent of their co-nationals in Romania. They were followed by Lithuanians (15 percent), Croatians (14 percent), and the Portuguese (13.9 percent).

Over the last ten years, the share of mobile Croatian workers increased from 12.2 to 14 percent of the Croatian population.

Germans are the least mobile, only 1 percent, followed by the British (1.1 percent), and the Swedish and French (1.3 percent), reported Dnevnik.hr.

Including data from 2017, some 348,000 workers left Croatia altogether, some 60,000 of whom were highly educated.

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