Croatia has 554,000 inactive people aged 20 to 64, including 154,000 aged 25 to 49 and around 304,000 aged 50 to 64, the Vecernji List daily reported on Thursday.

Every eleventh person among them has finished college and one in twelve has finished secondary school, according to Vecernji List.

Inactive people are the only area where Croatia could look for new labor on the domestic market, with stronger hiring of the elderly and even retirees.

According to a labor force survey, Croatia had 1,611,000 employed and 95,000 unemployed in the second quarter of this year.

It is an international method of monitoring work activity, according to which everyone who has done something in the past two weeks is counted as an employed person. Data published yesterday show that for every 100 people over the age of 64, 66 of them were employed, slightly less than six (5.7) were unemployed, while the rest were either inactive or studying.

Croatia is drastically losing its population in all younger age groups, including people up to the age of 65, however the number of older people is increasing. After all, every third inhabitant of Croatia is retired, which is one of the worst ratios in the EU. Croatia has young retirees due to its military population and war veterans, but also a relatively low retirement age compared to other countries where this limit is raised to 67 or 68.

The employment rate and activity is calculated only as of this year on the basis of official data on the number of inhabitants from the last population census. Until last year, data from the 2011 census was used for statistics, so all previous series will have to be adjusted to the fact that in ten years Croatia lost 400,000 inhabitants, writes Vecernji List .