by Natasha Pavlopoulou
ATHENS, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) -- As Greece is set to exit an eight-year bailout on Monday, the foundations for the country's growth have been laid, but more structural reforms are still necessary, a Greek expert told Xinhua.
Greece has managed to meet the international creditors' requirements under the three multi-billion-euro bailout programs signed since May 2010 to keep the ailing economy afloat, and create the foundations for its long-run growth, Theoxaris Grigoriadis, Assistant Professor at the Freie Universitat of Berlin, said in a recent interview.
"Nevertheless, less weight must be now placed on austerity and more on structural and administrative reforms, including the reorganization of corporate taxation and better monitoring mechanisms for tax evasion," he noted.
Greece has been praised for its achievements in fiscal discipline through painful measures implemented in the past eight years, financial indexes have impressively improved, but more work needs to be done, experts have warned.
The Greek government deficit stood at 15.7 percent of GDP in 2009, when the Greek debt crisis broke out, according to Eurostat.
Eight years later, the Greek economy has returned to growth. And according to the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), the GDP for the first quarter of 2018 (provisional data) increased by 2.3 percent over the same period of last year.
Grigoriadis believes that the focus should now be on reforms and the modernization of public sector. And it must also take place jointly with better and more incentives for small and medium entrepreneurship, a key determinant of Greek economic development, given the country's geographic and resource complexity.
Regarding the key issue of the sustainability of the Greek debt in the post-bailout era, he stressed that a political decision on debt relief must be taken at the level of the lenders, while it was the Greek government's duty to convince international capital markets and its European creditors to trust the Greek economy again.
"A sustained momentum of reforms and a Left-Right political consensus are key conditions in that direction," the expert stressed.
On the next steps forward after the Aug. 20 milestone, according to Grigoriadis, a precautionary credit line for the Greek economy is still required as the European Central Bank has indicated since May.
"This would offer a supporting mechanism to Greek bonds, accelerate the lifting of capital controls introduced in the summer of 2015 and allow for an improving business climate that would also translate to further political stability," he told Xinhua.
"The latter condition is a sine-qua-non component for private sector development and continued implementation of structural and administrative reforms," the expert stressed.
