Zadar County Overview

Ana ZubčićCounselor for International Relations and EU Funds – AGRRA

[email protected]

Zadar County OverviewOP Competitiveness and Cohesion 2014-2020

18th of October, 2016Capacity Building Workshop

• Zadar County overview

• Operational Programme Competitiveness and Cohesion 2014 – 2020• PA 3: Business

Competitiveness• IP 3d: Supporting the capacity

of SMEs to grow in regional, national and international markets, and to engage in innovation processes

• SO 3d1: SMEs' development and growth improved in domestic and foreign markets

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Zadar County

The County of Zadar is an administrative subdivision of the Republic of Croatia

It is one of seven coastal Croatian Counties and it is located in the very center of the Croatian part of the Adriatic coast

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Zadar County

The county's area is 7,854 km² (6,4 % of the territory of Croatia)

3,646 km² is land The sea area of the County is 3,632 km² More than 300 smaller and larger islands (Zadar archipelago)

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Zadar County

The population in the area of Zadar County according to the 2011 census was 170.398

Population density in Zadar County is 44,5 people/km²

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Zadar County

210 out of 229 settlements in Zadar County are in rural area

92,8% of the territory is rural 48% of the population lives in rural area

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Use of information and communication technolgies

Croatia ICT as a sector represents 4.2% of the total GDP 2.2% of overall active population is employed in it Croatia will seek to implement the ambitious targets

set in the Europe 2020 Strategy and Digital agenda for Europe flagship initiative

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ICT – main identified problems

Croatia Broadband penetration and NGN coverage levels:

both lagging behind the EU average levels Fixed broadband penetration was 21.7% in January

2014 (EU average was 29.8% in 2013) In 2013, 63.6% of households in Croatia had Internet

access (EU average was 76% in 2013) Although Croatia has already achieved good basic

broadband coverage (97% of population in 2013), total NGA network coverage in Croatia amounted to only 33% in 2013, which positioned Croatia far behind EU’s average NGA coverage of 62% in the same year

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Croatia Current level of NGA coverage is concentrated on few

densely populated areas of Croatia Considering this, significant number of households,

public administration sites, educational and health care institutions, as well as small and medium enterprises is unable to access the high-speed broadband and use advanced IT services, thus hindering uniform regional development in Croatia and exploiting of socioeconomic benefits related to the availability of NGA broadband networks

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Croatia At least 60% of Croatian population would not be

commercially covered by NGN infrastructure, due to poor profitability prospects for NGN investments in areas with lower population density

In order to foster extension of NGN coverage to these areas, public funds shall be used for support of investments in NGN infrastructure (backhaul and access portion of network), to complement private investments by operators in white and grey NGN areas

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Croatia

In order to reach 100% national NGA broadband coverage and close the existing and foreseen coverage gap in unprofitable areas by 2020, investments of up to €1.286 million are needed

At least 29.8% of this amount is foreseen to be covered by private investments from operators, while remaining share of 70.2% shall be covered by public support

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Croatia

Detailed analysis of the Croatian public ICT sector has detected deficiencies which mostly concern inadequate and inefficient cost and investment management in the ICT public sector

Public ICT projects are mainly implemented by individual state administrative bodies, without systematic coordination or possibility to use common resources while concurrently many systems have small utilization percentages of the available ICT infrastructure

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Croatia

Public e-services in Croatia are to a greater extent provided to companies than to citizens

Citizens have fully available 50% of basic public services via the Internet (in 2010), but compared to EU-27, Croatia is below average (EU27 81%)

Only 30.8% of citizens communicated with public authorities through online applications in 2013 (EU-27: 50%)

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Croatia

Digital Growth Strategy will give direction for the development of e-services, with a clear prioritization and orientation to results and will elaborate incentives aiming to increase the usage of eservices (e.g. faster treatment of e-requests and cost reduction in comparison to classical counter service delivery).

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Business competitiveness

SMEs

99,7% of the total number of enterprises in Croatia 68,3% participation in total employment 51% of GDP

Croatia: “moderate innovator”

SMEs innovation: 8% below the EU average

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OP Competitiveness and Cohesion 2014. – 2020.

Priority Axis 3: Business Competitiveness

Investment Priority 3d: Supporting the capacity of SMEs to grow in regional,

national and international markets, and to engage in innovation processes

Specific Objective 3d1: SMEs development and growth improved in domestic

and foreign markets

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Specific Objective 3d1 – results to be achieved

Implementation of modern information and communication technologies (ICT):

creates the possibility for optimizing the functioning of enterprises and affects directly the growth of innovativeness and competitiveness of the economy

The aim is to finance SMEs projects to deploy e-business solutions

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Specific Objective 3d1 – results to be achieved

Improving the competitiveness and efficiency of enterprises through ICT Support to enterprises introducing and implementing

e-business solutions provided by ICT Supporting e-services creation and provision between

enterprises (B2B) and implementation of ICT solutions

Supporting initiatives aimed at digitalization of business services and products

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Possible policy improvement

Policy more incisive and tailor-made to support business development and technological readiness of SMEs in rural area

Ministry of Entrepreneurship and Crafts: letter of support

Project’s media

Thank you!

Questions welcome

Government & Nonprofit

Zadar County Overview