Vladimír Dlouhý (born 31 July 1953) is írDlouhýa Czech economist and politician.
Dlouhý is a former deputy chairman of the ODA political party and Minister of Industry and Trade between 1992 and 1997 in the government of Václav Klaus. Between 1989 and 1992 he served as the Minister of Economy of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (ČSFR). He currently works in the private sector and in the field of consulting and pedagogy activities. In May 2014, he was elected a President of the Czech Chamber of Commerce.
Early life and education
Dlouhý studied economics at the University of Economics in Prague (computations in mathematical economic) and graduated in 1977. Between 1977 and 1978, he studied MBA at the Catholic University in Leuven in Belgium. As he was required to return to the Socialist Czechoslovakia, he did not manage to finish the two-year MBA studies. Between 1980 and 1982, he studied at the Charles University in a postgraduate programme of mathematical statistics and probability. Simultaneously, in 1980, he started Ph.D. studies at the University of Economics in Prague and, in 1983, he earned the degree of a candidate of science by defending dissertation thesis on the topic of ‘Unequal models of the socialist economy.’ A year later, this work was published as a book co-authored by Karel Dyba.
Career in academia
Between 1977 and 1983, Dlouhý lectured at the University of Economics (VŠE). In 1984, he was a founding member of the Prognostic Department of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (ČSAV), which later became the Prognostic Institute. There, he first worked as a research assistant, later as a head of department and eventually as a deputy head.
Political career
In 1978, Dlouhý joined the Communist Party. In the third week of the November revolution of 1989 he was nominated as one of 10 Communists to the government of Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and on 10 December 1989 he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of the federal government (the Government of National Understanding) where he also served as a Chairman of the State Planning Commission. In December 1989, he quit the Communist Party.
In the election Dlouhý joined the Assembly of People of the Federal Assembly (he was a lead candidate for the South Bohemian Region) and at the same time was appointed Federal Minister of Economy of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic in the second government of Prime Minister Marián Čalfa. After dissolution of the Civic Forum in the autumn of 1991 he joined the Civil Democratic Alliance (ODA) and became its deputy head and in 1992 he was a lead candidate of ODA in the South Moravia. After the 1992 elections and the subsequent dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic he joined the coalition government of Václav Klaus and was appointed the Minister of Industry and Trade. In the coalition government of Václav Klaus and in the same post he stayed even after elections in 1996, when he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic. In June 1997, he left all government and political posts.
Career in the private sector
After leaving politics in 1997, Dlouhý worked in the private sector. Since September 1997 until now he has worked as an international adviser for multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs where he is responsible for Central and Eastern Europe.
From 1998 to 2010, Dlouhý worked as an adviser for ABB Group. Since 2010, he has been an adviser to the French investment fund Meridiam Infrastructure based in Paris. In the past, he was either a member of supervisory boards or an adviser to a number of other companies, such as Cofinec B.V in Amsterdam, Telefónica Czech Republic (Prague), KSK Power Ventur based in Hyderabad, India, PSJ, a.s. (Czech Rep.) and others. From 2013 to 2018, he was a member of the Advisory Group at Rolls-Royce Holdings in London. He is currently also a member of the Supervisory Board of Kooperativa.