No new action for deficit blip
Greece has no plans to revise its fiscal measures, the Economy and Finance Ministry said yesterday, even though the European Union revised the country’s budget deficit for 2005 upward to 4.5 percent of GDP. The government had estimated Greece’s deficit for last year at 4.3 percent of output. But as part of its routine review of member states’ budget figures, Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, said yesterday that it thought the figure would be 0.2 percent higher – the second highest in the eurozone after Portugal. Having reduced the deficit from 6.9 percent in 2004, the government insisted that no changes were needed to overcome the latest setback. «It is feasible to reduce to the deficit to below 2 percent of GDP without the new measures being required,» the ministry said in a statement.
