Czech Republic sees fast wage growth in past decade

In the past decade, wages in the Czech Republic have risen by 51 percent, which is the most compared to neighbouring countries. However as far as the nominal wage goes, people in the Czech Republic still make significantly less than people in Germany where the wage growth has been much slower.

In the past ten years wages in the Czech Republic have grown almost twice as fast as in Germany or Slovakia, according to a survey by the company Purple Trading. The slowest wage growth was in Germany, where wages grew by 26.5 percent in the last ten years, followed by Slovakia with a growth of 27.1 percent, and Poland with 34 percent. Wages in Austria have risen by 36.9 percent since 2010.

Nominally, however, the Czech Republic is way behind Germany, where the gross monthly wage reaches the equivalent of 106,436 crowns, which is 193 percent more than in the Czech Republic.

People in Austria make the equivalent of 100,300 crowns a month, Poles make the equivalent of 29,591 crowns a month and Slovaks 27,000 crown monthly. In the Czech Republic the average monthly wage is 34,271 crowns.

According to the analysis, strong wage growth in the Czech Republic was driven by inflation, which was one of the highest in Central Europe, currently at 2.9 percent. In Germany, on the other hand, price growth is very slow and presently Europe's largest economy is even facing a deflation of 0.2 percent.

"Inflation is indicative of wage growth. We have done very well over the last few years, but productivity has sometimes not copied the strong wage growth. As a result of the restrictive measures, wage growth can be expected to stagnate next year, not only in the Czech Republic, but also elsewhere in Europe " Purple Trading’s analyst Štěpán Hájek told the ctk news agency.