Právo: Middle class declining, social gap grows

Prague, Feb 26 (CTK) - The middle class has been economically declining and the social gap growing in the Czech Republic, daily Pravo writes yesterday in reaction to fresh statistical figures.

"Ten percent of the lowest-income households have a net monthly income of less than 6000 crowns per capita. Another 20 percent have 8350 crowns per capita and month," CSOB bank's analyst Petr Dufek told Pravo, referring to households that the STEM polling agency described as financially endangered earlier this month.

The average gross wage in the country stood at about 25,000 crowns in 2012.

The number of people in a difficult financial situation, of whom there are about two million in the above 30 percent of households now, is likely to further rise this year as a result of a VAT increase, growing prices and record unemployment, Dufek said.

"About 20 percent of people aged 18-65 are incapable of saving anything from their incomes. Some 70 percent people save less than 5,000 crowns a month, mainly in their bank and pension fund accounts," Martin Lobotka, analyst from the Ceska sporitelna bank, told Pravo.

He said the group of people with comfortable incomes, who can save over 5000 crowns a month is 10 percent, the same as the group of the poorest.

In 2009, Czech households were able to save 11 percent of their incomes. This sum declined to about 9 percent in 2011. The social gap has grown simultaneously, Pravo writes.

"More and more often we handle the cases of households whose incomes made them a part of the middle class until recently, but they are no longer capable of repaying their loans now, in spite of having reduced their expenses," Kamil Kavka from M.B.A. Finance company is quoted as saying.

The fact that most Czechs save a certain sum every month but not even this group can afford what it could afford until recently has been confirmed by fresh data from the tourism sector, the paper continues.

Czechs tend to buy shorter holiday stays at seaside or in foreign mountains. They have reduced their winter holiday abroad from last year's average seven days to five days, and the summer stays from ten to nine days, the European insurer ERV's monitoring has shown, cited by Pravo.

($1=19.189 crowns)