Croatia

Women

Croatia ranks 29 out of 162 countries in the Gender Inequality Index, where a high rank equals high equality. Women should always be considered as a particularly vulnerable group though.

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Children

Croatia has a Workplace Index score of 2.2, a Marketplace Index score of 3.5 and a Community and Environment Index score of 2.2 in the Children’s Rights and Business Atlas, where countries receive scores between 0 and 10. A score closer to 0 reflects a need for basic children’s rights due diligence, while a higher score reflects a need for enhanced or heightened due diligence. Children should always be considered as a particularly vulnerable group though. 

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Persons with Disabilities

Due to differences in data collection and definitions it is difficult to compare countries on disability prevalence rates. Persons with disabilities should always be considered as a particularly vulnerable group though.

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Minorities and Indigenous Peoples

According to the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, the ethnic make-up of the Croatian population has changed considerably, as a result of the wars in former Yugoslavia. Between the 1991 and 2001 censuses, the population dropped by 7.25 %. The ethnic Croat population increased by 11.5 % and the minority population halved, with a particularly sharp drop of the ethnic Serbs from 12.2 to 4.5 %. However, the results of the census were disputed and are likely to have underestimated minority populations, particularly Serbs and Roma. The Croats are a Slavic people who speak Croatian, a language known before the war as Serbo-Croatian, the dialects of which did not conform to ethnic categories in the former Yugoslavia. Since the early 1990s politicians have prompted the differentiation of the common language into Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and even Montenegrin ‘languages’, leading to some conscious linguistic changes along ethnic lines. Ethnic Serbs are by far the largest minority and, together with the Roma, face the most discrimination and exclusion. There are also populations of Italians, Hungarians, Albanians, Bosniaks, Czechs and Slovenes. 

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Migrant Workers​

According to the ILO Global Estimates on International Migrant Workers, migrant workers as a proportion of all workers is 18.4 % in the subregion Northern, Southern and Western Europe.

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Persons in Armed Conflict

Croatia ranks 138 out of 179 countries in the Fragile States Index, where a high rank equals high fragility. For monthly crisis updates, check out CrisisWatch.