Fiscal policy

China will aim to achieve "a good start" in the first quarter for the economy, the state planner said on Jan. 15, signaling authorities could roll out more stimulus measures in the near term to counter slowing growth.

The Economy Ministry in Athens on Thursday announced that subsidies totaling 411.5 million euros would be granted to 2,527 tourism enterprises in Greece, after it had finished processing 7,297 business plans.

The same people who have shouldered the fiscal adjustment of recent years continue to pay the lion's share of taxes, with 90 percent of income tax paid by just 19 percent of the population, an event organized by the Economic Chamber of Greece (OEE) on the 2019 budget heard on Tuesday.

More than half of Bulgarian municipalities will receive vouchers for free internet in public places in the European Union (EU). This was announced by the Bulgarian commissioner for digital technologies Mariya Gabriel.

According to her, the Bulgarian municipalities rank among the top EU winners in the WIFI4EU initiative.

Greece deserves credit for improving the fiscal balance. To preserve this excellent progress, it is important to be alert to factors that can pressure the debt going forward - reality is always in flux. We have already mentioned two: fiscal operations that are not included in the reported fiscal balance, and the normalization of the effective interest rate on the debt.

The January-October budget data reveal that the primary surplus overrun of 1.4 billion euros, to 6.4 billion, is due to the dramatic reductions in public investment and tax rebates.

Greece's 2019 budget submitted to Parliament on Wednesday does not include the implementation of legislated pension cuts planned for next year, Deputy Finance Minister George Chouliarakis told lawmakers.

In the previous Note, we considered the relationship between nominal GDP growth, the fiscal deficit, and the evolution of the debt/GDP ratio. We noted that the math only works if the deficit accurately and truly reflects all the pressures on the stock of debt. In this Note, we can look at this issue in more detail with past data for Greece from 1995-2017.

This happened in the latest, fall report, while the initial figure was published in the spring report on EU's economic forecast.

The EC has also increased its forecast for Serbia's GDP growth in 2019 from 3.3 to 3.8 percent - the same for 2020.

If Greece was an enterprise it would have probably shut down already, given its negative net position.