Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 863 of 863 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
The Technology Agency of the Czech Republic funded 34 competence centres under its Centra kompetence programme from 2012, joining 334 participants, 115 research organisations, 118 SMEs and 101 large firms, against a planned 31 centres and 248 participants.
The national technology agency funded long-term consortia of research organisations and firms, each at least one research organisation and several companies, to run shared applied research programmes with a minimum private share of costs.
Preconditions
A national agency for applied research with its own programme budget
Universities and Academy of Sciences institutes able to lead multi-partner consortia
Industrial firms, including large manufacturers, willing to co-fund for up to eight years
Where else it has been used: The programme copied the competence-centre model used in Austria (aut-comet) and Sweden; its successor, the National Competence Centres, kept the consortium rule.
Limits: The agency evaluated its own programme, and the figures sit in a 101-page PDF: Tables 1 and 2 on printed pages 23 to 24 (PDF page 25), with parameters updated to 30 June and 15 September 2015 from the agency's IS Patriot and the national R&D information system. The counts are of supported centres and participants at contract signature, not of active collaboration in a given year, and a participant is an organisation, so one university can count several times across centres. The evaluation itself says the main objective of developing cooperation between research organisations and firms proved 'nepลรญliลก dostateฤnรฉ' (not sufficiently met), with results showing it only in part, and that the reported 25.9 billion koruna of product sales is dominated by one centre and was not verified. Funding received by the centres in 2012 to 2014 was 1.53 billion koruna. The programme ran to 2019 and was followed by Nรกrodnรญ centra kompetence; this record does not cover the successor.
๐จ๐ฟCzechiasince 2021still operatingbears on Public-private collaboration
The Czech Ministry of Transport procured the completion of the D4 motorway between Pลรญbram and Pรญsek as the country's first transport public-private partnership, and the concessionaire Via Salis opened 32 km of new motorway and 16 km of modernised sections on 17 December 2024 after 43 months of construction, as the ministry had announced in June 2021, with the state paying an availability payment until 2049.
The ministry tendered a design, build, finance, operate and maintain concession for one motorway corridor, the concessionaire took over the existing sections in 2021 and built the gap, and the state pays monthly only once the road is open, with deductions when availability or quality falls short.
Preconditions
Parliamentary approval of a multi-decade availability payment as a quasi-mandatory expenditure
Advisers able to structure the first deal in a country with no PPP track record
A corridor already permitted by the roads directorate, which spent CZK 364 million preparing it
Where else it has been used: Latvia's ฤถekava bypass (lva-kekava-ppp) and Slovakia's D4/R7 (svk-d4r7-ppp) used the same availability-payment model in the region; the Czech audit office's warning about missing domestic cost data is the lesson most likely to recur.
Limits: The opening, the kilometres and the 43 months are the ministry's own press release; the planned December 2024 opening is in the ministry's release of 9 June 2021 as listed on its D4 tag page, so on-time delivery is the ministry's claim checked against its own earlier announcement. The cost figures come from the Supreme Audit Office (NKร, audit 22/29, press release of 11 December 2023, https://www.nku.cz/cz/pro-media/tiskove-zpravy/nku-upozornuje:-vystavba-dalnice-d4-formou-projektu-ppp-mozna-pro-stat-nebude-tak-vyhodna--jak-se-predpoklada-id13640/), which warned that the value-for-money case rested mainly on the adviser's foreign experience because the ministry could not state its own maintenance costs for the 1,276 km of motorway it ran, and that with inflation the state's availability payment would be about CZK 4.2 billion above the CZK 29.5 billion approved. One project is not a programme: the record shows that the Czech state can close and deliver a PPP, not that it does so often. The concessionaire is French-owned (VINCI Highways and Meridiam), and the construction was done by VINCI's Czech subsidiary.
Czech Labour Office retraining reached almost 16,500 jobseekers and job applicants in 2023, 14,300 of them in courses they chose themselves, up from about 3,000 chosen retraining courses in 2018, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.
The Labour Office pays for retraining courses that it assigns to jobseekers or that people choose themselves, and the ministry opened an online e-shop of subsidised accredited courses that working adults can apply for directly.
Preconditions
A register of accredited retraining courses that the Labour Office can pay for
EU recovery funds to cover most of the cost
An online application route that does not require registration as unemployed
Limits: The figures are read from a PDF analysis by the ministry that runs the programme, and the 2018 figure is approximate and counts courses, not people. 16,500 people a year is a fraction of one percent of Czech adults; the same analysis says only 2.14 percent of registered unemployed people enter retraining and that Czech spending on retraining is among the lowest in the EU. The growth is driven by job applicants who are not unemployed, through a ministry e-shop, and only 11 percent of 2023 spending came from national funds, the rest mostly from the EU-funded National Recovery Plan, so the scale depends on money that is time-limited. The analysis notes that 2023 data are incomplete.
The Czech government approved the Antivirus employment support programme on 31 March 2020, with costs eligible from 12 March, and the Labour Office paid CZK 51.2 billion through it from 2020 to 2022 to almost 71,000 employers for 1.2 million employees.
The government used an existing power in the Employment Act to declare a targeted programme by resolution, so the Labour Office could reimburse employers for wage compensation paid to workers in quarantine or kept idle, backdated to the start of the emergency.
Preconditions
A statutory power to create targeted employment programmes by government resolution
A Labour Office able to sign agreements with tens of thousands of employers
Labour law that already obliged employers to pay wage compensation during obstacles to work
Where else it has been used: Slovakia's First Aid (svk-prva-pomoc) was approved the same day; the Czech audit shows the cost of a rule written for speed with no sharing of the burden and no impact monitoring.
Limits: The figures are in the audit office's PDF (CZK 51.2 billion and 70,971 employers in the summary table on PDF page 2; the government resolution No. 353 of 31 March 2020 and the eligibility period from 12 March 2020 in Table 1 on PDF page 7) and in its press release of 4 December 2023 (https://www.nku.cz/cz/pro-media/tiskove-zpravy/miliardy-na-udrzeni-pracovnich-mist-v-dobe-covidu-19-dostaly-od-statu-i-firmy--kterym-rostl-zisk-a-pocet-zamestnancu-id13610/), which gives almost 71,000 firms and 1.2 million employees. The audit office's verdict is negative: part of the money was spent ineffectively, CZK 9.8 billion went to industries where output did not fall, the A Plus regime paid 100 percent of wage compensation against the principle of cost sharing used elsewhere in the EU (CZK 4.4 billion could have been saved), ten of 31 audited firms drew CZK 1.9 billion while paying dividends, and the ministry and Labour Office did not monitor or evaluate the programme's effects. The 19 days from the eligibility date to the government decision are our arithmetic and are the second metric; the 1.2 million employees covered are in the press release only; the record does not show when the first payments arrived. The rule change was speedy; whether it was well targeted is what the audit disputes.
๐จ๐ฟCzechiasince 2014delivered and closedbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
The Ministry of Agriculture ran flood prevention programme 129 260 from 2014, funding polders, dike works and protective walls through the state river basin enterprises and municipalities, and its final evaluation reported 27 million cubic metres of new retention volume and about 17,491 metres of protective dikes and walls, against an original retention target of 123 million cubic metres.
After the 1997 flood, the Ministry of Agriculture set up rolling subsidy programmes, the first stage starting in 2002, that pay the state river basin enterprises, municipalities and regions to build polders, dikes and walls along watercourses.
Preconditions
State-owned river basin enterprises that own and maintain the watercourses and can act as builders
A national budget line that renews across programme stages
A ministry willing to keep funding works when targets slip, which here meant lowering the targets rather than ending the programme
Where else it has been used: The programme continues as stages IV (129 360) and V (129 500); the NKร found the same lowering of retention targets in stage IV, where the target fell from 68.83 to 5.41 million cubic metres.
Limits: Both numbers sit in table 4 on page 11 of the audit PDF, and the NKร took them from the ministry's own final evaluation, so the delivered values are the programme reporting on itself. The audit found that the ministry lowered its targets during delivery (the retention target fell from 123 to 26 million cubic metres) so that the programme could formally report fulfilment; against the original targets only 22 percent of the retention volume and 14.3 percent of the new dike length were delivered. The audit also found that the ministry had no common method for how recipients report indicators, which weakens every delivered figure. Retention volume and dike length are outputs; nothing here measures avoided flood damage, and the 2024 floods still caused 69.9 billion CZK of damage according to the same report. The start year comes from NKร audit 19/04 (page 15), which records the 4.65 billion CZK financial frame approved in 2014; that audit expected actual spending of about 2.8 billion CZK.
๐จ๐ฟCzechiasince 1950operating below its peakbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
Czech civil protection built permanent shelters from about the 1950s, reached its largest shelter stock in 1995 with places for about 10 percent of the population, and by 2026 the Fire Rescue Service counted just under 1,600 permanent shelters with capacity for about 310,000 people.
The Czechoslovak and then Czech state built a stock of permanent shelters in designated target areas, then after 1995 stopped building them and left upkeep to owners; the source names privatisation of the buildings that housed the shelters and the high cost of keeping them functional as reasons the count fell.
Preconditions
A state construction programme able to require and fund shelters inside public and enterprise buildings
Continued public ownership, or an enforced upkeep duty, for the buildings that hold the shelters
A budget line for maintenance and inspection once new construction stops
Where else it has been used: Germany abandoned its public shelters after a 2007 decision and Denmark let its stock decay; the same post-Cold War drawdown left all three countries reassessing sheltering after 2022.
Limits: The two numbers are in different units. The Fire Rescue Service gives the 1995 peak only as an approximate share of the population (about 10 percent) and gives no shelter count or capacity for 1995, and it gives the current stock as a count and a capacity but no share. Against the Czech Statistical Office population of 10,915,839 on 31 December 2025, 310,000 places is about 2.8 percent; that share is computed here and is not published by the service. Both figures are rounded ('about', 'just under'). The Prague metro protection system (theoretical capacity 332,000) and the Strahov tunnel (15,000) are counted separately on the same page and are not in the 310,000. The service states that permanent shelters are planned for use only in a declared state of war and that in peacetime it relies on the protective properties of ordinary buildings, so the decline measures a Cold War capability the state chose not to maintain, not the whole of its sheltering doctrine. The shelters were built only in designated places where weapons of mass destruction were expected, never evenly across the country. The source is the service describing its own field in a press FAQ, not an audit; the original hzscr.gov.cz URL redirects to the archiv.hzscr.gov.cz copy cited here.
The Czech Supreme Audit Office reported in June 2026 that 41 motorway sections totalling more than 300 km were opened to traffic between 2020 and 2024, after years with almost none (no kilometre in 2014, four in 2018), but that the average cost the state paid per kilometre of motorway opened rose from nearly CZK 275 million in 2020 to CZK 505 million in 2024, an increase of nearly 84 percent.
The transport ministry and its Road and Motorway Directorate prepare motorway sections through long zoning and permitting processes and then build many of them in a short window financed by the State Fund for Transport Infrastructure and EU funds, paying whatever the market price is when the sections finally reach construction.
Preconditions
A state road directorate with a pipeline of permitted sections ready to tender
A transport fund able to raise annual spending sharply
Permitting reform that releases sections held up for years, which is also what bunches them into a high-price period
Limits: The source is the audit office's English press release; the comprehensive report it summarises, based on 13 audits completed from 2020 to 2025, was not opened. Cost per kilometre opened is an average over whatever sections happened to open in each year, so it mixes simple and complex sections (tunnels, bridges, terrain) and nominal prices across a period of high construction inflation; the office says the rise 'cannot be attributed solely' to inflation or complexity, which is a judgement, not a decomposition, and no baseline against outturn is given for any single section. The 2020 figure is stated as 'nearly' 275 million. The same release gives project-level findings that support the schedule side: preparation of the D4 section took the Ministry of Transport and the Road and Motorway Directorate 21 years and was delivered as a PPP whose payments run to 2049, and the directorate had not completed the modernisation of 20 sections of the D1 for CZK 28 billion after 10 years. The record shows delivery volume rising and unit cost rising together; it does not show whether the 2020 to 2024 output was on its planned schedule. The started year is the first year of the audit office's comparison, not the start of the motorway programme.
๐จ๐ฟCzechiasince 2013still operatingbears on Large project delivery
Czechia's Road and Motorway Directorate (ลSD) rebuilt 160.8 km of the D1 motorway between Miroลกovice and Kรฝvalka in 20 sections from April 2013, reopening the last sections in October 2021, three years later than the 2012 schedule, with costs projected at CZK 29.844 billion including the ล mejkalka bridge against CZK 28.208 billion planned.
The Road and Motorway Directorate rebuilt the country's main Prague to Brno motorway section by section with traffic still running. The Ministry of Transport approved 20 separate section projects instead of one programme budget, and EU cohesion funds paid CZK 14.0 billion of the cost.
Preconditions
EU Operational Programme Transport co-financing for two budget periods, which paid half the cost
A road agency able to tender and supervise many concurrent section contracts, and a ministry that never set a binding overall schedule or budget
A permit appeal process that averaged 444 days per contested section, which set the pace more than construction did
Limits: The cost figure looks good only because of the baseline it is compared with. The 2012 plan of CZK 28.208 billion was never approved: the audit office says the Ministry of Transport rejected the summary investment plan and approved 20 separate section projects, with no binding overall budget or schedule. The roughly 6 percent overrun is our computation from two published totals, in nominal crowns, with no inflation adjustment. The final cost is unknown. The audit office says the figure is not final, several sections had not been financially settled, and the ล mejkalka bridge cost is a forecast for work planned from 2022 to 2026. Against an earlier baseline the project looks worse. The audit office's 2017 release (audit 16/06) gave the expected total as CZK 20.5 billion and found unit costs up 73 percent, from CZK 74 to 128 million per km, between the 2013 sections and those begun in 2015 and 2016. The three-year slip is measured to the August 2021 schedule, which ลSD revised 73 times. In November 2022 eight sections still lacked final approval, and nine bridges and three overpasses were in poor or very poor condition. The audit says the modernisation is not complete, so a later finish date would lengthen the slip. This is a rebuild of an existing motorway kept open to traffic, not a new build. The audit looked closely at only five sections, worth CZK 6.792 billion, and a cyber attack on ลSD's systems limited what auditors could see. The figures are ลSD's own, reviewed by the auditor, not independently measured.