Background The lands that today comprise Croatia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the close of World War I. In 1918, the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes formed a kingdom known after 1929 as Yugoslavia. Following World War II, Yugoslavia became a federal independent Communist state under the strong hand of Marshal TITO. Although Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it took four years of sporadic, but often bitter, fighting before occupying Serb armies were mostly cleared from Croatian lands. Under UN supervision, the last Serb-held enclave in eastern Slavonia was returned to Croatia in 1998. The People | Population | 4,493,312 (July 2007 est.) | | Age structure | 0-14 years: 16% (male 368,639/female 349,703)
15-64 years: 67.1% (male 1,499,354/female 1,515,932)
65 years and over: 16.9% (male 292,526/female 467,158) (2007 est.) | | Life expectancy at birth | total population: 74.9 years
male: 71.26 years
female: 78.75 years (2007 est.) | Population growth rate | -0.035% (2007 est.) | | Ethnic groups | Croat 89.6%, Serb 4.5%, other 5.9% (including Bosniak, Hungarian, Slovene, Czech, and Roma) (2001 census) | | Religions | Roman Catholic 87.8%, Orthodox 4.4%, other Christian 0.4%, Muslim 1.3%, other and unspecified 0.9%, none 5.2% (2001 census) | | Population below poverty line | 11% (2003) | | People living with HIV/AIDS | 200 (2001 est.) | | HIV/AIDS - deaths | less than 10 (2001 est.) | | Mobile phones in use | 2.984 million (2005) | | Internet users | 1.576 million (2006) |
Data (Background & The People) provided by The World Factbook |