GOOD PRACTICE IN CROATIAN SOCIAL POLICY – RECCOMENDATIONS FOR THE COUNTRIES OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

Social policy has the ideal of cohesion and inclusiveness of all citizens, but it has to “play” an active role in creating opportunities for them. It encopmasses in itself primarily a balance between economic efficiency and social solidarity distribution, and strives towards a  consensual social model in which the government and the opposition generally agree on the fundamental priorities of society.              Starting from July 1st, 2013, Croatia has been a member of the European Union. What experiences can that country bring to European Union? In spite  of the differences between the European countries becoming more and more expressed and bigger, there is a common element: a conscience that  social justice and social reconciliation could contribute to an economical development and that are not just an expense; but the  opposite: an economical development that  must contribute to social reconciliation.              In the process of the preparation for this work and during the process of  its realization, I used the methods of reading a lot of literature, including professional books, professional journals and legislation literature. Social policy has been for years one of my major fields of interest, so some facts I knew already.              My research goal is to examine the development so far of the social policy in Croatia, to detect the most important conditions which are necessary to develop  high-quality social policies, to discover which are strong sides, and which are weak sides of the Croatian social policy, and therefore what is important to strongly develop, and what is redundant and/or old-fashioned, to throw away or neglect.