Regions give cautious thumbs-up to government's National Employment Plan
The Czech government recently approved a National Employment Plan for 2001 - a bid to tackle unemployment, which currently stands at around 9 percent. The plan focuses on support for job creation and re-qualification, protection against illegal employment and improving conditions for small and medium-sized businesses. But what do the Czech Republic's regions make of the government's efforts? Zuzana Smidova is Radio Prague's correspondent in Ostrava - a region with around 15 percent unemployment - and at the other end of the country is Premysl Rosulek, Radio Prague's man in Plzen, where around 6.5 percent of the population are out of work. I asked them which industrial sectors had suffered the most in the ten years since the fall of Communism.