Greece still has “a long way to go,” said Bank of Greece Governor Yiannis Stournaras in light of Monday’s official end of the country’s third bailout program.
In an interview with Kathimerini newspaper Sunday edition said that there are still imbalances in the economy and the way the Greek State operates, areas that need to be reformed.
Stournaras said that while painful economic reforms have tackled issues such as the large deficits, market competitiveness in terms of unit labor costs, improved the corporate governance of banks, problems like the high public debt, non-performing loans, high unemployment, bureaucracy the country’s brain-drain and bureaucracy persist.
The BoG governor also warned that the country should not backtrack on its commitments to its creditors, otherwise international markets will abandon Greece. Especially now that the country is particularly vulnerable to economic turbulence in neighboring Turkey and Italy.
“If we backtrack on what we have agreed, now or in the future, the markets will abandon us and we will not be able to refinance maturing loans on sustainable-debt terms,” he told Kathimerini.
“If there is strong international turbulence, either in our neighboring Italy or Turkey or in the global economy, we will face difficulties in tapping markets given that the sensitivity coefficient of Greek bonds remains high,” Stournaras said.
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