Veterinary Economics and Epidemiology

The Department of Veterinary Economics and Epidemiology is the successor to the Cabinet for Livestock Economics, which was established in 1964 as an independent organizational unit of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Zagreb for graduate and postgraduate teaching and for professional and scientific work. The Department of Veterinary Economics and Epidemiology was established by the Statute of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in 2005. The teachers of the Department are prof. dr. Marina Pavlak, prof.dr. Denis Cvitković and prof. dr. Dean Konjević, who teaches in the compulsory courses Veterinary Economics and Veterinary Epidemiology and elective courses Management and Marketing of Veterinary Practice and Organization and Economics of Animal Husbandry. These courses developed from the courses Encyclopedia of Economy and Livestock Insurance, Economic Cooperatives and Alpine Economy, which were an integral part of the first curriculum of the Veterinary College in Zagreb in 1919.

The titles and curricula of these courses often changed in accordance with social economic circumstances in Croatia, and especially with changes in Croatian agriculture and veterinary medicine.

Today, veterinarians in Croatia work in numerous activities. Most of them work in: a) public administration and education, b) large and small veterinary practice, c) veterinary public health. Therefore, it is very difficult to conceive a consistent program of “economic education of veterinarians”. They need more and more economic knowledge and knowledge of management and marketing. It should be noted that the structure of the curriculum of the course “Veterinary Economics and Veterinary Epidemiology” was influenced by the establishment of the International Association of Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics (ISVEE) in 1976, which, by organizing 12 international scientific symposia, affirmed veterinary economics and veterinary epidemiology as scientific and teaching disciplines. A new impetus for the affirmation and improvement of the teaching of these courses comes from the expert group EAEVE (European Association of Establishments for Veterinary Education) and FVE (Federation of Veterinarians of Europe) which visited the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Zagreb in 2003 and 2013.