🇨🇿 Czechia

Czechia's 3.3% headline unemployment is a statistical trick with three components: (1) roughly 50,000–80,000 Czech citizens work in Germany, Austria, and the UK, hollowing out the skilled labour pool; (2) the denominator has shrunk because the young keep leaving — youth unemployment rising from 6.4% to 10.6% signals even those who stayed can't find work; (3) the gap is papered over with Ukrainian refugees on temporary protection status filling logistics, manufacturing, and care work. Median age of 43.7 and a 32.4% old-age dependency ratio mean the pension pyramid is being propped up by workers who may be repatriated the moment Kyiv stabilises. The Czech statistical office's migration data shows persistent net outflow of 20–34 year-olds to German-speaking countries — the brain drain is the structural story, not the side note.

Czechia adopted a National AI Strategy in 2019 that reads like a Brussels homework assignment: ambition in paragraphs, funding in ellipses. The 2024 update gestures toward sovereign AI compute and Czech-language LLMs but relies heavily on EU recovery funds and German OEM R&D spillovers. Retraining infrastructure is threadbare — the country has no equivalent of Germany's dual system and no appetite to build one. Effectively, Czech policy is to hope Volkswagen doesn't kill Škoda's ICE volumes before the gigafactory at Mladá Boleslav matures.