This economy will turn from crisis to recovery when enough individual businesspeople have enough confidence to invest and create jobs in the country. That is why AmCham decided to devote this year’s General Assembly to asking a basic question that seems to have been ignored in the long and heated debate over how to rescue the Czech Republic from its third, and most sustained, economic crisis since the Velvet Revolution. The question, in fact, is very simple: what will it take for businesses to switch from saving for bad times to spending for better?

The right people to ask this question are not macroeconomic experts or politicians or media pundits, but business people themselves. Business people are the ones who collectively will decide if they have enough confidence that a crown spent today will turn into a profit in the future. To answer this question, AmCham gathered four individuals who are faced with such decisions daily, and whose decisions could provide a leading indicator of when a recovery will occur: Zbyněk Frolík of Linet, Petr Stračár of GE, Martin Jahn of Volkswagen and František Dostálek of KPMG.

Summary of the discussion (in English).

Summary of the discussion (in Czech).