The new Czech government has announced its planned legislative programme from 2007 to 2010:
Reform of public budgets, taxes and tax system
- reduce the public budget deficit to no more than 3% of GDP in 2007, 2.6% of GDP in 2008 and 2.3% of GDP in 2009
- maintaining the level of corporate and personal income tax between 17% and 19%, to benefit families with children and people on low-income
- keeping two rates of VAT: maintaining the basic rate at between 17% and 19%, and raising the lower rate (currently 5% but expected to rise to 9%)
- introducing a new ecological tax from 1 January 2008 to limit energy consumption in industry and encourage employment by reducing employment secondary costs
Reform of the pensions and social welfare system and public health service
- changing social security policy to lower mandatory expenses to less than 50% of the public budget
- raising the retirement age to age 65
- introducing additional direct payments for issuing prescriptions, spending a day in hospital and visiting an emergency specialist
- making health insurance companies more effective by converting them into a kind of joint-stock company
- considering using CEZ profits to fund pension reform
Privatisation, transportation, energy and environment
- working towards the privatisation of Czech Airlines, Prague Airport and Czech Post, and the possible partial privatization of Czech Railways
- limiting the operation of vehicles over 7.5 tons on public roads on Friday afternoons, Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons
- for vehicles over 3.5 tons, introducing a toll system that combines microwave and satellite system and will cover all state-operated roads
- encouraging the building of high speed railway and connecting them to the existing European high speed railway network
- ensuring a 40% decrease in energy consumption per GDP unit by 2020
- keeping brown coal mining limits and not building any new nuclear power plants or facilities
Others
- seeking to reform the EU Agricultural Policy during the Czech Republic’s chairmanship of the EU in 2009
- seeking to amend to the new Labour Code to provide greater flexibility in employer/employee relations
- converting all records at the Cadastral Registry to a digital format
- proposing legislation to reconcile the recognition given to written communications with electronic communications
- seeking constitutional changes to allow the president to be directly elected
Social Media cookies collect information about you sharing information from our website via social media tools, or analytics to understand your browsing between social media tools or our Social Media campaigns and our own websites. We do this to optimise the mix of channels to provide you with our content. Details concerning the tools in use are in our Privacy Notice.