{"id":513,"date":"2018-03-09T15:56:52","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T15:56:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/?p=513"},"modified":"2018-03-09T16:09:29","modified_gmt":"2018-03-09T16:09:29","slug":"european-commission-berates-zagreb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/2018\/03\/09\/european-commission-berates-zagreb\/","title":{"rendered":"European Commission Berates Zagreb"},"content":{"rendered":"

The European Commission issued<\/a> its regular report<\/a> on Croatia this week. The report lists some limited improvements in implementation of some of the Commission\u2019s recommendations from last year, but says structural reforms are lagging behind. The report analyzes economic and social situation in the member states, and assesses possible imbalances.
\nThe Commission finds that Croatia made some progress in implementation of the five recommendations it made last May, related to public finances and taxation, pensions, labor market, salaries, civil administration and state-owned enterprises, services and the administration of justice.
\nBut the report states that the \u201claws necessary to strengthen the fiscal framework were not adopted\u201d and notes that the Real Estate Tax was scrapped. Some steps were taken to rationalize the health system, hospitals in particular, but old debt in the health system continued to grow. Social reforms were reduced in scope, and a package of measures to reform the pension system was delayed again.<\/p>\n

Active measures aimed at persons with low level of education and long-term unemployed are almost unused, and the education system reform is still on hold in spite of some encouraging developments. The major reform of public administration is mostly gridlocked.
\n\u201cSome improvement\u201d was noted for measures to improve the business environment, in particular reduction of red tape and para-fiscal taxes. Progress was shown in sale of minority shares in various companies owned by the state and activation of property owned by the state. Also, case backlog in Croatian courts was marginally reduced and some measures were adopted to reduce the number of bad loans.<\/p>\n

One of the remarks that caught most of the attention in Croatia<\/a> was labeling the veterans as a “privileged group”, and noting that they have been granted “further benefits” including a possibility of family members inheriting their pensions, which are about double from pensions of average citizens. The EC was also not optimistic about the impact of these measures on the overall system of social measures in Croatia.<\/p>\n

The report also includes an analysis of excessive imbalances, which the Commission started looking into last November in 12 member states. Croatia, together with Cyprus and Italy, is among the three countries where those imbalances are excessive. Bulgaria, Portugal and Spain are out of the \u201cexcessive\u201d range, whereas Slovenia no longer shows any imbalances. Commission experts told the press that Croatia should look into what countries that resolved the issue of imbalances did. According to T-Portal, experts claim that those countries are not better than Croatia, but that they actually implemented the measures they themselves defined. Croatia, on the other hand, is the worst among them in implementation of measures it itself defined. \u201cThings are constantly postponed, such as the real estate tax or the pension reform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, the same experts are warning that Croatia is now showing growth above its potential, which is now slowing down two quarters before the Commission expected it to happen. Basically, their conclusion is that Croatia cannot enhance its growth potential without serious structural reforms. The Commission believes that the Croatian economy will grow by 2.8% in 2018, and by 2.7% in 2019. (C. this report was written before the Statistics Bureau published its Q4 results for Croatia, indicating that the growth has slowed down more than expected, so the total growth in 2017 actually came 0.5% below expectations. The EC did not publish any adjusted numbers so far.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The European Commission issued its regular report on Croatia this week. The report lists some limited improvements in implementation of some of the Commission\u2019s recommendations from last year, but says structural reforms are lagging behind. The report analyzes economic and social situation in the member states, and assesses possible imbalances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":516,"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions\/516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrbusinessmonitor.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}