News Archive Copyright CTK Czech News Agency, Prague, 1997. All rights reserved. Besides easing the tax burden and completion of privatisation, the coalition three is also to discuss the deregulation of energy prices and housing rents.
Subsidies are to be completely stopped as from the second half of next year.
Since 1990 heat prices have grown by more than 570 percent. This increase proposed by the Finance Ministry is rejected even by a number of coalition politicians. However, a simple comparison of prices in various periods is not sufficiently objective if other indicators are not taken into consideration. One of them is inflation which amounted to 56.5 percent in 1991, and which dropped under ten percent only in 1995, reaching 8.8 percent last year. Meanwhile, the average net monthly pay has trebled from 2,504 crowns in 1989 to an estimated 7,470 crowns in 1996.