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Quarterly monitoring of the Greek economy

By Tasos Dasopoulos

The Ministry of Finance wants to achieve zero deviations from the commitments and the budget figures that have been locked in the negotiations with the institutions, so that the provisional fiscal rules of the Commission set “reasonable” goals.

As you know, the discussion on the fiscal rules for 2023, started in the first Eurogroup of the year with some positions from the Eurozone finance ministers on the issue. The debate is expected to begin after the national elections in Italy, Portugal and France in mid-May, and no one can say for sure how long it will last.

In the meantime, however, Member States will have until the end of April to submit the revised stability program 2022-2025 and by the end of May the revised medium-term fiscal strategy 2023-2026. To do this, the European Commission will have to publish in March some provisional fiscal rules for each country for 2023, when the full escape clause is lifted, so that Member States have a basis to develop their forecasts. .

In this direction, the European Commission will monitor the fiscal data in all member states and especially the heavily indebted ones like our country, in order to be able to shape the framework in which they should move. Greece, due to the status of Enhanced Supervision, is in a state of continuous monitoring and quarterly evaluations by the EU, the European Stability Mechanism and the IMF. However, this quarter the monitoring will be more detailed, as like all other countries it will return in 2023 to the status of fiscal targets that existed in 2019, before being lifted due to special circumstances created by the pandemic.

The monitoring of YPOIK

At the same time, the Minister of Finance emphasizes at every opportunity that the fiscal targets that Greece should undertake to implement should be “reasonable”. This term implies that Greece should not return to targets for achieving primary surpluses of 3.5% of GDP, which were in force until 2019.

Therefore, our partners must be convinced that Greece has “turned the page”, has gone through strong growth, continues to implement reforms and despite the increase in debt and deficits due to a pandemic, is no longer in danger of slipping into new fiscal adventures.

The good news that is coming to the economy will help in this endeavor. By the end of February there will be evidence that the primary deficit in 2021 was higher than 6% of GDP but will be less than the 7.3% of GDP projected in the budget as revenues will have exceeded targets by about 1.5 billion euros. This, despite the support measures of 17.3 billion euros implemented in 2021. Also, in March is expected to be officially certified, that finally the growth of the previous year was 8% from 6.9% provided by the budget.

At the same time, the financial staff is paying attention and will continue to pay attention during this period to everything that could lead to any deviation from the targets of the 2022 budget. , to deal with the precision wave in front of the doors.

Source From: Capital

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