Greek households consume, do not invest

Greeks consume their savings or borrow to cover their expenses. However, they do not invest, for example, in bonds, shares or pension plans, but only in property, contributing in their own way to the rapid rise in prices.

The above stems from Eurostat data on disposable incomes, the level of savings and investments of households in the European Union, data that largely show that the lesson from the previous decade has not been learned.

According to Eurostat, Greece and Romania were the two EU countries where the savings rate in 2023 was negative, at -1.9% in Greece and -6.8% in Romania. A negative saving rate means that households spent more than their gross disposable income and therefore either used savings from previous years or borrowed to cover their expenses. Overall, in the European Union the average saving rate (resulting from dividing the gross amount of...