Under fire from criticism for the lack of budget savings, the government ordered a detailed review of all expenditure items last October. Committees were tasked with this review, and one of them (for the analysis of the operations of agencies, institutes, and funds, led by the director of the Zagreb Institute of Economics, Dubravka Jurlina Alibegović) was supposed to propose concrete solutions – mergers, closures, layoffs.
In the meantime, the institutions that led these sectoral committees have also come under scrutiny. Namely, the Minister of Science, Vedran Mornar, ordered yet another study and another committee – one that should propose models for the restructuring of public scientific institutes. Rumors have been circulating for some time that the Institute of Economics and the institutes for public finance and international relations should merge, perhaps even the Institute for Tourism (although it could merge with the Ministry of Tourism and the Croatian Tourist Board, which are reportedly options).
How informed the rumors are remains unknown. Mornar’s ministry did not respond to repeated inquiries from Lider about models and solutions. Meanwhile, scientific institutes claim that they had a meeting with the minister and his deputy in January and never again, although the ministry promised to consult with them on everything. Scientists are expressing a desire to know the exact goals of the restructuring (savings on salaries or employees could have consequences more expensive than the savings). They warn of a number of problems faced by scientific institutes (25 of them): reduced funding, lack of knowledge about the criteria for contracting multi-year institutional funding for scientific activities, and the inability to employ doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, exacerbated by insufficient transparency in the calls for proposals from the Croatian Science Foundation for funding scientific projects and for funding doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.
