Greece’s Public Investment Budget is one of the main channels the government uses to get liquidity to businesses that have been hit by the pandemic.

This is something we noted early in this newsletter’s existence, so as the year draws to close, it’s time for an update on the latest monthly Finance Ministry data on the central government’s budget execution. By the end of November, year-to-date spending had risen to 8.4 billion euros, an increase of more than 5 billion euros on the same period last year.

After a dip in PIB spending during the summer, expenditure has picked up again over the last few months — the 1.4 billion euros spent in November was the most since May. This is to be expected, given both Greece’s return into lockdown that month, and the government’s commitment of more resources to combatting the pandemic’s economic impact

The International Monetary Fund’s latest monitoring report on Greece has a helpful annex looking the fiscal measures the country has taken. This includes the following figure, which shows that how much heavy lifting government spending is doing compared to other countries, where governments have also made greater use of off-budget guarantees.

Other data

• Overall, the central government’s primary budget deficit for January to November came in at 13.9 billion euros, compared with a surplus of 6.9 billion euros in the first 11 months of 2019.

• Greece’s non-seasonally adjusted third-quarter unemployment rate stood at 16.2 percent. Though this time series plays second fiddle to the adjusted and more frequent monthly data, the quarterly survey does feature interesting colour, including this year on how Covid is affecting work, as with this chart.

  

• Revenue for companies obliged to submit monthly data fell 7.4 percent in October compared to 2019, according to Elstat’s latest update.

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Next week’s key data

Monday:

• October balance of payments (Bank of Greece)

Elsewhere on the web

• Greece looks set to join the world’s ranks of electric car producers (again) as German-Dutch manufacturer Next.e.GO Mobile is planning a 100 million-euro investment to build a factory in the country

• WWF economist Olivier Vardakoulias joins the MacroPolis team to discuss how Greece will use the money it receives from the EU Recovery and Resilience Fund in the latest Agora podcast

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