Nearly 1.46 million households in Greece are reportedly eligible to receive portions of a “social dividend” to be doled out by the government next month, with income and asset criteria finally being listed in a bill ratified to facilitate this year’s “holiday bonus”.
At last word, the average bonus to be handed out to a household comes to 483 euros, based on figures included in a draft 2018 budget tabled in Greece’s Parliament on Tuesday.
The number of people corresponding to eligible households is just more than 3.472 million, roughly 32 percent of the people in the country of 11 million.
While the leftist-rightist coalition government has presented the “social dividend” as the product of efforts to curb tax and contributions evasion, as well as increased employment, the political opposition directly blames a “tax tsunami” imposed in 2016 in order to meet fiscal targets the Tsipras government agreed to meet, as per memorandum obligations.
On paper, the roughly 1.4 billion euros to be funneled back to a large chunk of households comes from an over-performance in terms of the primary budget surplus target, as a percentage of GDP.
