Croatia, together with Greece, Italy, and Spain, had one of the lowest rates of employment in 2018 even though it surpassed the target set for 2020, said a Eurostat report released on Thursday.

In 2018 the employment rate of people aged 20 to 64 in Croatia stood at 65.2% or 1.6 percentage points higher than in 2017. Only Greece and Italy had a lower rate, 59.5% and 63% respectively. Spain too was among this group with a rate of 67%.

Almost half of the EU member states had employment rates of more than 75%, with Sweden registering the highest rate of 82.6%.

In 2018, the employment rate of people aged 20 to 64 in the European Union (EU) stood at 73.2%,as against 72.2% in 2017.

Croatia surpassed the target rate of 62.9% as envisaged in the European strategy for 2020.

Employment rate of persons aged 55 to 64 is growing

The employment rate of persons aged 55 to 64 in the EU has grown steadily, from 38.4% in 2002 to 58.7% in 2018.

Croatia, along with Luxembourg and Greece is among those EU countries with the lowest employment rate of this age group (42.8%). In 2017 that rate was 40.3%.

Croatia fares a little better than EU average in gender gap

Statistics indicate that there is still a large difference in employment of men compared with women in EU countries.

The greatest gender gap in 2018 was registered in Malta with the difference of employment of men being 22.3 percentage points higher than employed women.

In Croatia the rate of employed women was 60.1% compared with 70.3% of employed men, which is a gap of 10.2 percentage points.