Without new residents and bringing in workers from abroad, Croatia cannot maintain a welfare state, it was said on Tuesday at a conference - "How to boost economic development with labour policies and continuous investment in education" - at the Lavoslav Ruzicka Polytechnic in Vukovar.

The director-general of the Croatian Employers’ Association (HUP) Damir Zoric assessed that a large part of today’s unemployed people in Croatia fall into the category of hard-to-employ and those whom the labor market can hardly count on.

“The second part of the problem is young people leaving the country and the third problem is trying to import labor. Last year, Croatia issued about 100,000 work permits to foreigners, and this year we already reached that number around the middle of the year,” Zoric said, adding that the majority of foreigners coming to work in Croatia are from neighboring countries, but even that “pool” has already been somewhat exhausted.

According to Zoric, Croatia is now turning more and more to India, Romania, and Ukraine, where mostly poorer educated workers are coming from.

“Unfortunately, we are not yet attractive enough for highly educated personnel, because with our salaries we can hardly meet their demands”, he said, adding that it is necessary to make labor costs in Croatia cheaper so that workers earn more while reducing obligations to the state.

State Secretary in the Ministry of Labor and Pension System Ivan Vidis considered that the ministry’s participation was important in the creation of a portal for advanced monitoring of the labor market and education. It is a research tool that brings together all data on the labor market in one place, from data on employment and unemployment in the sector to data on secondary and higher education for occupations in that sector, as well as data on the workforce and employers’ needs.