Prague - The Czech Republic is among the most successful transforming countries in the world courtesy of its economic development and transformation to democracy but needs to cultivate its political life.
That's the result of the newest study of the Bertelsmann Foundation, which evaluated 125 countries in the world in the categories of the status of democracy, political management and economy parameters.
According to its report, the level of political culture has significantly decreased in the last two years in the Czech Republic.
In the category of the political management, the country reached the 10th place in 2006, whereas it fell on the 20th place in 2007 - between India and Macedonia.
Only Poles and Romanians behind
The Bertelsmann Foundation study shows that in the group of those EU member states that are seen as transforming countries, only Romanians and Poles have more serious problems with their political elites.
In the past two years, Poland has witnessed an equally sharp drop in the quality of political scene as the Czech Republic has.
The problem of the Czech political elite is that it is not able to set priorities and perform appropriate reforms. In addition, it hasn't introduced any program aimed at better management of human resources so far.
On top of that, it lacks effective mechanisms to fight corruption.
Poland struggles generally with the same problems. In addition, it is being criticized by the Foundation for its conflicts with the EU and authoritarian leanings of the previous government of Jaroslaw Kaczyński.
Praised for its welfare state
However, the Czech Republic succeeded in economic and social issues, beating even states such as Estonia, Slovenia, Taiwan, or South Korea.
Although these countries scored high in economic growth, private property protection, and free trade, the Czech Republic has surpassed them in protecting its citizen from falling into poverty.
The country is also said to give its citizens the power to determine their lives.
It is not clear how a comparison with more developed countries would look like though. Not only the USA, Japan, Australia, and "traditional" EU member states, but also Malta and Cyprus fall under this category.
Undeserved prosperity
The Bertelsmann Foundation's study presents the Czech Republic among the countries that are able to exploit positive circumstances, such as the EU membership, in order to reach better economic performance.
However, it is not succeeding in using this opportunity to build an effective political system. The study see the same problem in Poland, Slovenia, Lithuania, or Hungary.
This evokes the term "undeserved prosperity" used by American political scientist Fareed Zakaria to describe rich oil states in the Arab world.
Happy with their easy oil profits, these backward authoritarian regimes do not need to perform any economic or political reforms.
In a similar way, new EU member states are not forced to reform themselves since their membership in the EU and the possibility to participate on the bloc's prosperity brings them success.
According to Zakaria, countries that experience "undeserved success" pay the price of facing political instability and uncertain economic future.
