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CERGE-EI Media Highlights for May

11 June, 2021

"We say it's important to invest in infrastructure and it’s important to note that education is also a part of infrastructure," said Jan Švejnar on the radio program Interview Plus.

According to him, the government should help at least until the end of this year: "We have relatively low debt, we are less in debt than we were in the middle of last decade. We have more room for manoeuvre compared to other countries, such as Italy, Germany and the United States."

Filip Pertold commented on easing anti-Covid restrictions in the Czech Republic on the television show Otázky Václava Moravce: "I don’t understand why we are easing restrictions in restaurants when young people are not yet vaccinated. This is a mystery to me, and unfortunately it’s probably due to the fact that the pandemic law is simply written incorrectly."

In an interview with the newspaper Lidové noviny, Štěpán Jurajda emphasized the need to invest in education and drew attention to the effects of closing schools: "Most of our elite think it won't be a problem to catch up. For example, if there is no decrease in the success rates of Scio tests, which are tests of study and educational prerequisites for admission to secondary and higher education, the elite will think that this is not a problem. But these are the results of the very group of children whose parents are highly involved in their education. International research in recent years, from times when teaching was also interrupted, shows that children whose parents did not pay such attention to their studies would never fully catch up to others due to the break in their education."

"The Czech state administration is very outdated, ossified and isolated from the development of modern technologies, management, use of scientific knowledge and is reluctant to cooperate, for example, between ministries, let alone externally," Daniel Münich told Neovlivní.cz. "It has been able and is able to do routine activities, such as paying monthly pensions. However, thinking about, designing, discussing, testing and successfully implementing reform measures was a difficult challenge for the state administration long before the pandemic. So, it's no wonder that our state apparatus is failing so much during the period of Covid."

"How to Keep Dads at Home? The Ministry Is Preparing a New Benefit for Them," is the title of an article in the newspaper Mladá Fronta Dnes, in which Klára Kalíšková comments on the Ministry of Labor’s plan to introduce a new benefit that would shadow parental allowance: "We’ve observed from countries where this has been implemented that if fathers are to participate in care, it must be a benefit calculated at a higher percentage of income. If it is a flat rate at a relatively low level, fathers do not participate."