Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 863 of 863 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
Croatia's register of public-private partnership contracts lists 17 contracts with an estimated capital value of EUR 338.3 million, 13 of them signed between 2006 and 2008, mostly Varaลพdin county schools, one in 2013 for Zagreb Airport, one in 2016 and two street lighting contracts in 2018, and none since October 2018.
Counties and cities signed design, build, finance and maintain contracts for schools, halls and a bus station in a burst before the 2008 crisis, the state concessioned the Zagreb Airport terminal in 2013, and then PPP contracting all but stopped while responsibility for PPP passed to the economy ministry.
Preconditions
A PPP law and a ministry able to approve projects quickly
Local governments with the capacity to prepare PPP tenders, which only a few had
Eurostat treatment that keeps contracts off the deficit, whose tightening after 2008 made the model less attractive
Where else it has been used: Lithuania (ltu-vpsp) kept a steady flow of small municipal PPPs with a central agency's support; Croatia's register shows what happens without that pipeline.
Limits: The counts are ours: the register page lists 17 contracts and a total of EUR 338,260,027, and the signature dates are on each contract's own page under /jpp-project/ (for example Zagreb Airport, 2 December 2013; Novi Vinodolski street lighting, 25 October 2018, the latest), which we opened one by one and tallied. The register holds only contracts entered under the PPP framework; concessions under the separate concessions law, such as motorways, are not in it, so the record does not show that private participation in Croatian infrastructure stopped, only that the PPP model did. The ministry's project list (https://investcroatia.gov.hr/jpp/projekti/) also shows approved projects not yet contracted, such as Trg pravde in Zagreb (EUR 179.2 million) and county schools, so the pipeline is not empty. The peak itself was narrow: ten of the 13 early contracts are in Varazdin (eight school extensions, the county building and a sports hall). Zagreb Airport alone is EUR 188.6 million, more than half the register's value. The register page has no date of update, so the zero is as of retrieval.
๐ญ๐ทCroatiasince 2017delivered and closedbears on University-industry collaboration
Croatia's Operational Programme Competitiveness and Cohesion reported at its close that 284 enterprises supported under its business research and innovation priority had cooperated with research institutions by the end of 2023, against a target of 250, and 38 more under its research capacity priority.
Croatian ministries ran research and innovation grant calls under the cohesion programme that paid firms for research and development projects carried out with universities and public institutes, and reported each participating firm against a common European indicator.
Preconditions
Cohesion funding far larger than the national research budget, with a common indicator the managing authority had to report every year
Public universities and institutes able to sign research contracts and collaboration agreements with firms
Firms able to co-finance research and to carry the administrative load of a structural funds project
Limits: The values are what the Croatian managing authority reported to the Commission in its annual implementation reports, so they are the programme's own account, republished by the Commission without audit. CO26 counts enterprises, not projects, money or results, and the definition counts any firm that took part in a supported project with a research institution, so a short contract counts the same as a multi-year centre. The two priorities are reported separately and a firm can appear in both, so 284 and 38 are not added here. A research institution includes public institutes as well as universities, and the dataset does not split them. The dataset gives no figure per call, so the record cannot say how much came from the competence centres and how much from the individual research and innovation grants. The money was mostly European Regional Development Fund co-financing, so the record shows what cohesion funding bought through Croatian ministries as much as national research policy. The first achieved value appears in 2017, so the started year is the first reported delivery, not the first call. No reversal was found: the programme closed on schedule, and whether the 2021-2027 programme continues the collaboration at the same scale was not checked.
The Croatian Employment Service enrolled 23,627 people in training paid for by its education vouchers in 2025, 9,786 of them in digital-skills programmes and 2,558 in green-skills programmes, and 53,106 people in total from the scheme's start on 1 April 2022 to the end of 2025.
The public employment service gives unemployed and employed adults a voucher that pays for an accredited short programme chosen from a national catalogue of skills, booked through an online application.
Preconditions
A catalogue of accredited providers and programmes tied to a national qualifications framework
A digital application through which adults apply and providers are paid
Temporary EU recovery funding large enough to open vouchers to employed people
Where else it has been used: Voucher and individual learning account schemes in the corpus include France's CPF (fra-cpf), Singapore's SkillsFuture (sgp-skillsfuture) and the Dutch STAP budget (nld-stap-budget), which was abolished; Croatia's is the newest and its continuation after the recovery plan is not yet funded.
Limits: The service reports on its own measure, in an 82-page PDF (printed page 43, PDF page 45). 'Included' means enrolled in a programme, not completed. The yearbook says 54, 13 and 33 percent of users 'completed' digital, green and other programmes; the three shares sum to 100, so they describe the mix of programmes and no completion or employment rate can be read from them. It also splits users into 70 percent 'traลพitelji zaposlenja' (jobseekers) and 30 percent unemployed without defining the first group, which presumably holds employed people seeking training or a new job; the share of employed adults is therefore not stated. The vouchers are financed from Croatia's EU Recovery and Resilience Plan (reform C4.1 R3), so the scale depends on money that runs out in 2026, and the yearbook gives no budget beyond that. The 2025 intake is not compared with earlier years in this file.
The governing board of the Croatian Employment Service decided on 20 March 2020 to introduce job preservation grants for employers hit by COVID-19, the service began implementing them on 23 March, taking applications online, and in 2020 it paid HRK 7.70 billion to 109,431 employers covering 697,126 workers on 225,390 applications.
697,126 workers, workers covered by job preservation grants in the year, 2020. 3 days, days from the board decision (20 march 2020) to the start of implementation (23 march 2020), 2020-03-23. Hrvatski zavod za zapoลกljavanje (HZZ), Godiลกnjak 2020, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
The employment service's governing board created a flat per-worker grant by decision, took applications online through a dedicated site, and paid employers monthly for March to May, then extended and adjusted the grant through the year as restrictions continued.
Preconditions
An employment service whose board can create a measure without new legislation
An online application channel built in days
European Social Fund and state budget money that could be redirected
Where else it has been used: Croatia reused the same instrument for later shocks: in 2026 the service ran a job preservation grant for employers hit by wildfires in Omiลก and Braฤ (mjere.hr).
Limits: The employment service reports on its own measure. The figures are in a PDF: the 20 March decision on PDF page 9 and again on page 41, the 109,431 employers, 697,126 workers and HRK 7,703,685,673 on PDF page 10 and page 41, the 23 March start and the 225,390 applications on page 41. The three days are our arithmetic. The yearbook counts workers covered at any point in 2020, and the same employer could apply repeatedly, so workers are not a monthly peak. To run the grants the service suspended part of its regular active labour market programmes from March to May 2020, which the yearbook states; the record does not show how many jobs the grants preserved or whether any money went to firms that would have kept their staff anyway.
๐ญ๐ทCroatiasince 2020still operatingbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
Croatia's Ministry of Construction, Physical Planning and State Assets and Ministry of Health had disbursed 16 percent of the 200 million US dollar World Bank earthquake recovery loan approved in June 2020 by November 2024, when the closing date was extended for the second time to 30 June 2027, and by May 2026 had restored 40 percent of the targeted health and education buildings.
After the March 2020 Zagreb earthquake the government borrowed from the World Bank to rebuild damaged hospitals and schools and to fund public health preparedness, while spending EU Solidarity Fund grants first; the loan's complex hospital works then took years to tender and its closing date was extended twice.
Preconditions
A rapid damage and needs assessment that sized the loan within three months
Implementing units inside the construction and health ministries that survive changes of minister
A construction market with capacity to absorb recovery works, which was lacking after the second earthquake
Limits: The World Bank finances the project and rates it (moderately satisfactory on both counts in June 2026), so this is a lender reporting on its own loan. The 40 percent is an intermediate indicator in the ISR's results table; the 16.32 percent disbursed and the extension from 31 December 2024 to 30 June 2027 (after an earlier extension from 30 June 2024) are in the Second Restructuring Paper of November 2024 (https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099110624203564259/text/P173998-7d9a1555-e106-4a16-b043-2253208f955b.txt, paragraphs 1, 4 and 5). The loan is a small part of Croatia's recovery: the restructuring paper itself says about 1 billion euros of EU Solidarity Fund grants had to be spent within 18 months and became the government's priority, which is one reason the loan lagged, so this record shows the slow track, not the whole national response, and Croatia's own reconstruction fund figures for private homes were not read at an official source. The paper also cites a government change, four changes of ministry leadership in four years, the December 2020 Petrinja earthquake and construction labour shortages. The project builds hospital and school buildings that are not finished, so the record documents recovery in progress, not completed. Status is operating, not eroded, because no part of a delivered peak has been lost; the delay is the finding.
Croatia's road authority awarded the 2,440-metre Peljeลกac Bridge to China Road and Bridge Corporation in 2018 for HRK 2.081 billion excluding VAT with a 36-month completion deadline, works started on 31 July 2018, the last steel segment was installed by 28 July 2021, and the government expected the bridge and access roads to open in June 2022, in a project whose eligible costs of 420 million euros were 85 percent financed by an EU grant of 357 million euros.
The government revived a cancelled bridge as an EU cohesion-funded major project, tendered it on price with a fixed deadline, and let it to the lowest bidder, a Chinese state contractor, while EU money covered 85 percent of eligible costs.
Preconditions
An EU cohesion allocation large enough to cover most of a single national megaproject
A feasibility study commissioned by the European Commission that settled the choice of route
A road authority able to run an open international tender and enforce a fixed deadline
Limits: The source is a government news item written by the national news agency Hina at the moment the span was closed, so it carries the government's framing and gives a contract price and a deadline, not a final cost: no final account or audit of the bridge's outturn cost was read. The page puts the total project value at 'โฌ526 billion', an evident typing error for 526 million, and the EU grant figure appears as 'โฌ357' without a unit; the record uses the 420 million euro eligible cost and 357 million euro grant stated elsewhere on the same page, and the European Commission's release of 7 June 2017 (read through the Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20190715235249/https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/newsroom/news/2017/06/06-07-2017-commission-approves-eu-financing-of-the-peljesac-bridge-in-croatia) confirms 357 million euros and 85 percent. The 36-month deadline from 31 July 2018 fell at the end of July 2021, when the span was joined; the expected June 2022 opening was a forecast on the page, and the actual opening date (reported as 26 July 2022) was not read at an official source, so the record can say only that the structure was joined on its contract deadline and opened about a year later with its access roads. The project had an earlier history the page omits: a first construction contract from 2007 was cancelled by a later government, according to press reports not used as a source. The bridge was built by a Chinese state-owned contractor, so the delivery attributable to Croatia is the procurement, financing and project management.