Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos used a “road show” in London as a backdrop on Thursday to promise that his leftist-rightist coalition government’s extra spending in 2019 will stay within a forecasted “fiscal space”, which he again estimated as reaching 900 million euros.
Athens and most creditors now agree that primary budget surpluses, both this year and 2019, will exceed the 3.5-percent of GDP goal – mostly on the back of increasingly punishing tax burdens on individual taxpayers and businesses, as well as lower public investments and curtailed spending.
Asked about the burning “hot potato” entailed in pending pension cuts as of January 2019, Tsakalotos merely repeated that a suspension of the austerity will not affect Greece’s social security system after 2030, while he questioned whether the IMF continues to insist that the measure is a structural reform. Ιn fact, he said the issue was a “technical matter”.
An IMF spokesman, nevertheless, told reporters in Washington D.C., almost at the same time as Tsakalotos was making his statement, that the Fund stands by its position over the necessity of the pension cuts.
