Yugoslavia HISTORY The Serbian royal House of Karađorđević became the Yugoslav royal dynasty. Yugoslavia gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris.[3] The country was named after theSouth Slavic peoples and constituted their first union, following centuries in which the territories had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929, it was invaded by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941. In 1943, a Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was proclaimed by the Partisan resistance. In 1944, the king recognised it as the legitimate government, but in November 1945 the monarchy was abolished. Yugoslavia was renamed the Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. It acquired the territories of Istria, Rijeka, and Zadar from Italy. Leader of the Partisans Josip Broz Tito ruled the country as the president until his death in 1980. In 1963, the country was renamed again to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Labor and Unemployment Unemployment was a major problem for Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. During that period, over 875,000 Yugoslavs worked abroad and as much as 25 percent of workers employed in the productive social sector were classified as surplus labor; nevertheless, more than 1.2 million people were registered as unemployed in 1988. This was about one-sixth of the total working-age population of Yugoslavia that year. Yugoslav unemployment statistics were based on the number of people who registered with the government as job seekers in the social sector. Several factors caused inaccuracies in such figures, however. Students often registered as job seekers in order to receive better health benefits; many workers registered if they were seeking a job better than the one already held; and some of the unemployed did not register because they saw no prospect of getting a job. Because unprofitable Yugoslav enterprises often were supported by the government and prevented from going into bankruptcy, workers in the social sector rarely lost their jobs before the reform of 1990. Therefore, a large proportion of job seekers in the 1980s were young people. In 1988 over 92 percent of the unemployed were under age forty, and nearly 57 percent were under age thirty. Yugoslav unemployment also tended to be long-term: according to official statistics for 1988, although almost one-quarter of the unemployed were able to find work in less than six months, almost 62 percent were without a job for over one year, many for more than three years. A third characteristic of Yugoslav unemployment was the large regional differences in unemployment rates. In 1986 Slovenia was at virtually full employment while the underdeveloped region of Kosovo had more than one job seeker for every two workers employed in the social sector. Several factors interacted to raise unemployment in Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Immediately after World War II, peasants made up about four-fifths of the population. Rural workers increasingly were forced into the cities to seek jobs, better health care, improved earning potential, and pensions. Two government policies stimulated this movement. Following traditional Marxist development patterns, Yugoslavia concentrated investments in heavy industry, directing capital away from agriculture and further impoverishing the peasants. And the policy of discouraging nonfarm private business eliminated a potential alternative economic activity. Marxist ideology obliged social sector enterprises to absorb extra labor, even if it meant redundancy and decreases in labor productivity. (see table 12, Appendix). The economic reforms of the 1960s gave market forces more influence in enterprise management decisions, which helped eliminate excess labor. Fortunately for Yugoslavia, at this time several West European countries required imported labor; Yugoslav workers were encouraged to leave the country for temporary jobs in Western Europe. Then the oil price shock and worldwide recession of 1979 dropped labor demand in Western Europe and forced many Yugoslav guest workers to return home. Domestic enterprises returned to conditions of surplus labor and low productivity. By the late 1980s, however, the guest worker force was again contributing substantial amounts of hard currency to the Yugoslav economy. In the late 1980s, measures such as improved health care and pensions attempted to raise the rural standard of living and draw some of the unemployed out of the cities; but in 1990 prospects for stemming unemployment still seemed poor. The primary goal of the 1990 economic reform was to reduce Yugoslavias runaway inflation. But the new anti-inflation policies aggravated the unemployment problem as they improved labor productivity EDUCATION History of Yugoslav Education Primary schooling in interwar Yugoslavia was a four-year course. Although enrollments more than doubled between 1919 and 1940, on the eve of World War II only about 27.3 percent of Yugoslav young people between five and 24 were enrolled in school or receiving some kind of instruction. Only about 4 percent of the pupils who completed primary school went on to secondary schools. Muslim parents remained suspicious of education for women, and many rural areas had no schools at all. In the late 1930s, about 40 percent of the population over ten years of age was illiterate. Striking regional disparities existed in levels of literacy. While over three-quarters of all Slovenes and Croats could read and write, only a tenth of Kosovos ethnic Albanians were literate. Yugoslavias interwar education system was highly centralized, and instruction was exclusively in Serbo-Croatian. Macedonians and Croats especially resented Belgrades dominance of education; many Croatian teachers enlisted in the pro-Nazi Ustase forces during the war. World War II decimated Yugoslavias teacher corps and damaged heavily its education facilities. In 1953, 14.5 percent of the active nonagricultural population had not finished four grades of elementary school, while 63.5 percent had not completed the eighth grade. In the postwar period, the Yugoslav government invested heavily in rebuilding the national education system. Besides building new schools, libraries, and other facilities, the government took energetic steps to enhance the qualifications of Yugoslavias teaching cadres. By 1989 the majority of teachers in primary and secondary schools held university degrees. In addition, schools began employing a variety of teacher aides and specialists, including librarians, media specialists, medical personnel, special-education instructors, vocational-training specialists, and computer programmers--most of whom were university graduates. Within thirty years after adoption, such measures radically changed the educational base of the Yugoslav population. By 1981 only 2.7 percent of the active nonagricultural population had less than three years of primary school; the portion that had not completed the eighth grade had fallen to 18.9 percent; and 58.1 percent of that group had at least a high-school diploma. Of the overall population, 25.5 percent had completed a secondary program and 24.2 had completed eight years of a primary program .
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 10:20:29 +0000
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