WEB engleska verzija end.indd - UNDP Croatia

CHAPTER 3THE SOCIALLY EXCLUDED3.7.1 Human Rights ViolationsIn Croatia, the employment picture improved considerablyin the early 2000s. During the 1990s, the activity rateof employable people was decreasing and unemploymentwas steadily increasing. However recent growthin the Croatian economy has been accompanied by amarked recovery of the employment rate (rising from51.6% in 2001 to 54.8% in 2005) as well as a steady declinein unemployment (dropping from 15.8% in 2001to 12.7% in 2005). Unfortunately, these positive trendsin the Croatian labour market have done little to reducethe share of the long-term unemployed in the totalunemployment rate. More than half of all unemployedpeople have been searching for a job for more than ayear, and the number of those that are ‘very long-termunemployed’ (2 years or more) shows a steady increase.The burden of unemployment falls particularly hard onyoung people, reflecting their problems of entry intothe labour market. However, although young peopleare disproportionately represented in the overall unemploymentrate, the majority of them are short-term jobseekers. The proportionally smaller amount of older individualsseeking employment, tend to be unemployedfor a much longer period of time.Education matters as well. People with vocationaleducation are particularly likely to fall into unemployment.Those whose education doesn’t exceed the primarylevel are particularly prone to long-term unemployment.Persons who have some amount of highereducation are less likely to be unemployed, and evenless likely to suffer from long-term unemployment.Among the unemployed, especially the long-termunemployed, women constitute the majority despitethe spread of the services and sectors traditionallydominated by women.3.7.2 Unemployment Benefits 105Upon becoming unemployed and registering with theCroatian Employment Service (CES), individuals witha sufficient history of unemployment contributionshave the right to income maintenance through unemploymentinsurance, as long as they can demonstratetheir job-search efforts. The insurance payments canlast from 13 weeks (for those that have contributedfor at least 9 months during the previous 2 years) to65 weeks (20 or more years of contributions). Giventhat this is the mechanism of social security basedon individual contributions, the unemploymentFigure 8: Employment and unemployment rates (%)16 %14 %12 %10 %8 %6 %4 %2002 2003 2004 2005Long-term unemployment rateTotal unemployment rate -leftEmployment rate - highShare of long-term in total unimployment65 %63 %61 %59 %57 %55 %53 %Source: Labour force survey, Central Bureau of Statistics78105 This chapter draws heavily from the UNDP-led Quality of Life survey data. In making comparisons and analysis that inform this chapter,only those who both defined themselves as unemployed and stated some effort in job search during the previous month were consideredto be unemployed. Most analyses compare short-term (less than a year) unemployed, long-term unemployed and the employed. All thedifferences and effects reported are based on results of various methods of statistical analysis (measures of association, ANOVA and linearor logistic regression models).