The need for emphasis on growth is now imperative and, given the current state of the economy, privatizations are the only hope for achieving it, Alpha Bank argues in this week’s economic bulletin.

“The recovery of the Greek economy presupposes that the program of privatizations and development of public property assets will proceed without delays and will be adequately enriched with investment portfolios capable of attracting significant amounts of foreign capital,” the analyst authors of the study say.

Alpha Bank considers that the government has begun gaining momentum on the economic front and that the budget performance this year may be better than expected. The analysts even believe that a primary surplus of 0.5 percent of GDP is possible.

“Within two-and-a-half years Greece has managed to drastically reduce its macroeconomic imbalances and substantially increase the international competitiveness of its economy... The conditions have been thus created for its full weaning off the hard drug of continuously increasing borrowing from abroad,” the analysts say.