Stability and Growth Project (PSA)

The Stability and Growth Program is submitted within extremely adverse financial and economic conditions. The political system is facing a triple challenge: a) the consolidation of the public finances of the country through effective structural measures in order to reduce the budget deficit and the public debt to GDP.
b) Ensuring conditions for achieving a positive rate of growth by the end of 2010 and
c) enhancing economical competitiveness in the long term.

The reduction of competitiveness in the recent years is reflected on the widening of the deficit balance of current exchanges from 6,3% in 2004 to 14,7% in 2008 on small inflows of immediate foreign investments and on the reducing percentage of private sector investments and expenditure intended for research and development not only as a percentage of total investment but also of GDP.The Greek businesses, which are mostly small and very small at size compared at the European standards, are facing a number of difficulties to remain competitive on both domestic and international market. Consequently, export increase is reduced and Greek business dividends disappear.

To overcome these challenges, a series of reforms are being promoted including changes on public finances, contributing therefore in changing of mentality, the standard development and improvement of competitiveness.

The reforms described above are classified as follows into five categories:

• Improvement of public finance quality.
• Measures to reinforce growth and employment.
• Strengthen private sector development.
• Creating a more efficient public sector.
• Horizontal interventions

Monitoring implementation of the Stability and Growth Program

The Vice President of the Hellenic Government, mandate by the Prime Minister, supervises the Stability and Growth Program implementation.

The implementation monitoring of the reforms included in the Stability and Growth Program, is effectuated systematically by the Office of the Vice President thanks to the function of the Monitoring System of Growth and stability Actions program..

The actions that are being encouraged are codified into a specific timetable schedule, followed by Ministries in the framework implementation of the Stability and Growth Program.
The timetable schedule is the Annex D “Reform Program Timetable Schedule” of the Stability and Growth Program.

The monitoring system is based on an online web application to which Ministry associates have access, providing the system with data.
Systematically each Ministry sends during regular periods of time the status of each action through a special online process.
Data is being collected by the system, and after a formal control process are integrated into the system.
The Ministries have continuous online access to the Actions Status table, so that the executives are up to date with the recent information regarding the action status.
Additionally, there is continuous online access to the executives of the offices of the Prime Minister, the Vice President, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Advisors.

Every 15 days a Stability and Growth Program implementation report is being conducted, which constitutes a snapshot of the actions’ status for that period of time. The report is promulgated by the Vice President of the government to the Prime Minister and Ministers and is published on line,
on the website of the Office of the Vice President of the Hellenic Government http://antiproedros.gov.gr .

The actions of the Growth and Stability Project are reflected in the report, by the responsible Ministry, Timetable, status reforms, and also by the relative decisions or laws. The actions pending implementation or are within the timeline schedule, are shown in white shading; the reforms which are complete on time, with green shade; and the actions that are behind the timeline schedule are in red shading.

Dowload in pdf form the Hellenic Updated Stability and Growth report (Greek).