🇭🇷 Croatia

Croatia is a textbook emigration exporter: roughly 300,000+ citizens (mostly working-age) have left since EU accession, with Germany, Ireland, and Austria the primary destinations. The youth unemployment rate at 16.4% (trending sharply upward to 23% in recent periods) understates collapse catastrophically — the denominator has been shrinking for a decade as the mobile and skilled leave first. Median age of 44.3 with an old-age dependency ratio of 37% means the fiscal base is hollowing out precisely when AI threatens the remaining tourism and back-office jobs. Real unemployment among under-30s who stayed is functionally far worse, masked entirely by the brain drain that the EU counts as 'freedom of movement working as intended.'

Croatia adopted a National Development Strategy 2030 mentioning digitalization in the way all EU periphery strategies do — as a bullet point between 'demographic renewal' and 'regional development.' No dedicated AI industrial policy exists. The country relies on EU Recovery and Resilience Facility funds for any digitization talk, with no retraining infrastructure for the workers tourism and IT outsourcing will shed. E-government initiatives exist on paper; AI-specific legislation is essentially absent.