Municipal Finance
Although a 1990 State law gave Czech municipalities responsibility for most urban services, they had no reliable source of capital financing to meet their budgetary needs. In 1993, the Czech Government requested that USAID help it establish a market oriented system of lending to local governments in order to strengthen the country’s municipal infrastructure finance system.
In addition, USAID conducted a comprehensive program that combined various approaches in working with more than 600 Czech municipalities.
Approaches included:
- Making short-term visits to a large number of municipalities to help them strengthen infrastructure projects for submission to prospective lenders;
- Providing more sustained assistance in capital improvement planning to a small number of municipalities to gain deeper experience in local problems and to demonstrate promising new approaches and techniques;
- Spreading knowledge about best practices in infrastructure development and finance nationwide; and
- Bringing Czech practitioners face-to-face with their US counterparts to discuss mutual problems and solutions.
For more information on municipal finance in the Czech Republic, please see the USAID mission’s closeout report “Partnership for Change”.
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