In the last World Bank’s World Development Report, Serbia occupied the 27th place in the list of 157 countries ranked according to the Human Capital Index.

The World Bank developed HCI for 157 countries in order to measure the contribution of human capital to productivity of the next generation of workers.

According to HCI, Serbia is ranked better than the countries in the region, since Macedonia is 88th, Kosovo is 80th, Montenegro is 59th, Bosnia and Herzegovina is 58th, Albania is 56th, Bulgaria is 44th, while Croatia occupies the 36th place.

At the presentation of the World Bank’s World Development Report, which is this year dedicated to the changes in the nature of jobs caused by technological development and to human capital, Simeon Đankov, Director of the World Bank’s Development Economics Department, said that education in schools and education of children in Serbia and in the region were competitive at the international level.

Over the past five years, the IT and service sectors have recorded the highest growth in opening job vacancies, while the number of travel agents particularly increased, reaching a number five times higher than in 2014 due to an increasing number of people who want to travel and have an active vacation.

Đankov thinks that people should not worry that they would lose their jobs because robots cannot think like people and do not have empathy. The number of European countries that do not have enough workers is increasing because the number of people is dropping and they must be as productive as possible.

The guest at the presentation of the World Bank Report was Mr. Zoran Đorđević, the Minister of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Policy, while Mr. Pavle Petrović, member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Mr. Aleksandar Vlahović, President of the Serbian Association of Economists, participated in the presentation.

The presentation was organized by SASA, Serbian Association of Economists and World Bank Office in Serbia.

HCI comprises five indicators: the probability of survival until the age of five, the expected years of schooling, harmonized test scores as a measure of quality of learning, the fraction of fifteen-year-olds who will survive until the age of 60 and the proportion of children who are not stunted.

The report can be downloaded from the following webpages:
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/391401552652470576/pdf/WDR-2019-SERBIAN.pdf
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/816281518818814423/pdf/2019-WDR-Report.pdf