It is 4 in the morning on April 28. At the Syggrou Avenue stop in the center of Athens, four taxis wait for customers to arrive. The first three do not accept payment by credit card for the trip to the airport, which costs 58 euros, because they say they do not have a dataphone. “It’s a lie, we all have the machine since March 1, but no one wants to use it,” confesses the fourth taxi driver, whose name is Yorgos but prefers not to give his last name.
Just a few hours later, in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, the same scene is repeated with other taxi drivers. They complain that they have changed the taximeters so that they are automatically connected to the Treasury. “The problem is that the entire cost falls on us,” complains Aris Karafilis, a taxi driver with 23 years of experience. The Ministry of Economy has modified the card payment system in several sectors to avoid fraud and tax evasion. In the hospitality industry, customers must now pay at the time of ordering the drink, instead of at the end as was customary. Inspections have multiplied in fruit and vegetable street markets.
The fight against the underground economy is one of the great battles that conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is waging to bring Greece up to European standards, when next year will mark a decade since the crisis in which the country risked its permanence in the European Union. The other great battle was that of the digitalization of the State. Now it is possible to request online the collection of unemployment benefits, the registration certificate, registration in the electoral roll or the income tax return, among many other procedures that five years ago required long lines in offices.
There are two great battles left to fight: that of corruption and that of deficiencies in infrastructure. But, in general terms, the figures show that the country has righted itself. GDP growth after the pandemic has exceeded the European Union average. It was 8.4% in 2021 (compared to 6% in the rest of Europe), 5.6% in 2022 (compared to 3.4%) and 2% in 2023 (while the EU only grew by 0. 5%, on average). Greece now has unemployment 10.2%, far from the 25% it reached a decade ago, although it is still not close to the 8.6% it presented in 2008.
In the opposition, the leftist Syriza He usually remembers that this Government reaps the fruits of what this formation sowed when it was in power, between 2015 and 2019. The professor of legal philosophy Costas Douzinas, Syriza deputy until 2019, maintains that the first mission that the first left-wing government was to turn Greece into an efficient state. “You could even say that it consisted of turning Greece into a true bourgeois State, capable of doing what the German, British or French State does and then, in a second phase, being able to use it to introduce democratic and social measures.”
The growth that this country of 10.4 million inhabitants has experienced since the pandemic is largely due to tourism, which represents 13% of GDP, a figure very similar to Spain’s 12.8%. In 2023, 36 million tourists visited Greece, 20% more than the previous year. Tourism income increased by 16.5%, a record figure, with 20.6 billion euros.
Anthony Bartzokas, visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics, indicates by email that the data that reflects “Greece’s solid, if not spectacular, growth” has been the normalization of the risk premium. This indicator – the difference between its 10-year bond and the German 10-year bond, considered the safest in Europe – is trading today at 100 points, ten times lower than in 2015, when Greece was at risk of default and The Greeks saw this premium rise to over a thousand points some days.. However, the analyst points out that in the medium term Greece should address its productivity and, in the long term, the public debt problem. Currently the debt represents 161.9% of GDP.
Government and opposition are aware that there is still a long way to go in the modernization of the State. And that in that stretch European help will be essential. From 2021 until last January, Greece has received almost €15 billion in subsidies and loans from the European Union Recovery Fund, a sum equivalent to approximately 8% of its economic production. as the Government assumed last January.
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