Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-19-Speech-2-337"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20070619.44.2-337"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, Mr Papadimoulis, the Commission is completing its analysis of Greece’s revised GDP and GNP figures. It has used the same procedure for that analysis as for all of the other Member States.
Furthermore, and in view of the high indebtedness and the expected increase as a result of ageing, it is recommended that the Greek authorities as soon as possible draw up future forecasts for spending linked to ageing and improve the long-term sustainability of the public accounts, providing the resources necessary to achieve the mid-term objective.
On 20 April, following the meeting of the Eurogroup in Berlin, the Greek Minister for the Economy and Finance formally and publicly announced that the government had decided to bring forward from 2012 to 2010 the time limit for achieving that medium-term budgetary objective.
The procedure and timetable employed are as follows:
On 22 September last year, Greece presented the Commission with the revised figures on its gross domestic product and its gross national product. These figures represented a revision upwards of approximately 26%. At the end of October last year, therefore, a month after having received that information, Eurostat communicated those figures for an initial analysis by the Member States' GNI-Committee.
The committee then issued a statement to the effect that it did not have sufficient information on the revised data and the changes in methodology communicated by Greece. The committee also pointed to the urgent need for Greece to cooperate fully with Eurostat and to provide a completely revised inventory of its GDP and its GNP, explaining in detail the new sources and methods used by Greece for its national accounts, in order to enable Eurostat to carry out a complete verification of the new data and inform the committee of the results of that verification.
Greece presented the inventory to Eurostat on 6 February of this year, in the form of a 460-page document in Greek. Following the relevant translation, Eurostat is completing the analysis of that documentation and it will send a mission to Greece by the end of this month. Like those carried out in other countries, experts from other Member States take part in that mission, in order to ensure the necessary degree of transparency.
The results of the mission will be analysed with Greece firstly and then any comments made within that context will be taken into account in the final wording of the report assessing the revised figures for Greek GDP and GNP. Eurostat will present this report to the committee for an in-depth debate. It is hoped that it will be presented no later than October 2007.
With regard to the second part of your question: according to our spring forecasts, carried out on the basis of the non-revised Greek GDP figures, the public deficit for this year is expected to fall to 2.4%, compared to last year's 2.6 %. For 2008, on the assumption that current policies are not changed, the Commission foresees a slight increase in public deficit, from 2.4% to 2.7%. All of this is on the basis of the GDP figures prior to the revision.
With regard to the level of indebtedness, it is calculated that it will continue to fall, from the 104.5% of GDP in 2006 to around 100.7% in 2007 and 97.5% in 2008. In view of these figures, on 16 May of this year the Commission recommended to the Council that the excessive deficit procedure, which had been opened up two years earlier, be ended, and on 5 June of this year the Ecofin Council adopted the decision to close the procedure, in accordance with the Commission’s proposal.
Furthermore, on 27 February of this year, on the recommendation of the Commission, the Ecofin Council approved its opinion on Greece’s updated stability programme for 2006-2009 and in that opinion Ecofin recommends that Greece take advantage of the favourable economic situation to progress towards the mid-term objective – which is budgetary balance – in order to continue improving the budgetary process, increasing its transparency and defining a budgetary strategy within a longer-term perspective which effectively applies mechanisms intended for the supervision and control of primary spending."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples