Η συνέντευξη του πρωθυπουργό Γ.Α. Παπανδρέου στα Αμερικανικά Μ.Μ.Ε .
June 20 (Bloomberg) –
– Greece’s austerity program is ahead of targets and will ensure the country will be able to honor its commitments, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said.
Greece is “showing better performance on our spending reductions” and has performed “better than our target was for the first six months,” Papandreou said in a radio interview today on “Bloomberg on the Economy with Tom Keene.”
“We are changing the whole public sector, which was overly grown, overly expensive,” the prime minister said in the interview in New York.
The program will “give us a cushion” that will “give us quite a bit of money,” he said.
Shrinking the public sector also helps by “convincing our citizens not to be as tax evasive as they have been in the past,” he said.
Tax collections are running 9.5 percent ahead of last year, he said. Papandreou said “our basic deficit in Greece was our credibility deficit” and the steps his government has taken are aimed at showing “we are a credible partner to our creditors.”
Default or a debt restructuring “is not inevitable,” Papandreou said.
“This is not only our commitment but it is a commitment by our European partners,” he said.
Marco Annunziata, chief economist with Unicredit Group in London, said on the same program that Papandreou is “signaling a very strong commitment to doing all they can to overcome” Greece’s fiscal crisis.
Greece has cut spending, raised taxes and trimmed wages to tackle the deficit, which swelled to 13.6 percent of gross domestic product last year, more than four times the EU limit. To secure the EU-IMF aid, the government pledged to trim the shortfall to 8.1 percent of GDP this year and bring it back under the 3 percent EU ceiling in 2014.
The crisis has prompted investors to sell the bonds of Greece and other high-deficit nations and pushed the euro down 14 percent this year. The government expects that the austerity measures, which amount to almost 14 percent of GDP over four years, will deepen the country’s recession and lead the economy to contract 4 percent this year, about twice the 2009 pace, and by 2.6 percent next year.
