Croatian employers will have to seek workers on distant markets, as they cease to be interesting to job-seekers from Serbia or Ukraine, the Vecernji List daily reported on Monday.

The daily newspaper quotes a member of the Croatian Employers’ Association (HUP), Petar Lovric, who has a recruitment agency, as saying that employers should turn to labour markets in Bangladesh, Nepal or India, for instance.

In 2022, Croatia is likely to seek about one hundred thousand workers, mainly for short-term seasonal jobs.

The daily says that the situation is similar in some other European countries. For Instance, Switzerland will need thousands of skilled workers, and according to some estimates by 2025, it will be short of 375,000 highly skilled workers. This shortage will widen to 1.2 million by 2035.

As many as seven million foreign workers would need to be hired by Germany until 2035 to enable its economy to maintain this rate of development, the Zagreb-based daily reported.

Currently, in Austria, there are twice as many advertised vacancies than a year ago.

A former economy minister turned economic analyst, Ljubo Jurcic, is quoted as saying that well-educated professionals are globalists and added that Western European countries base their long term economic policy on immigration quotas.

Thus, Germany imports 400,000-600,000 workers annually, and Jurcic believes that Croatia will have to follow this model soon.

In the past, Germany received immigrant workers from the Balkans and Turkey, and now Germany is looking towards employees from Columbia, Mexico, Indonesia etc., the daily said.