November 2022

Inflation taking ever bigger bite out of Greek retirees’ pension income

Pensioners in Greece are struggling to make ends meet as galloping inflation and high energy prices take a toll on household budgets. After they lost an average of 25 percent of their income during the Greek debt crisis-related bailouts (2010-2018), the recent jumps in food and heating costs take their anxiety up a notch. During a recent interview granted to Xinhua in a cafe in central Athens, Christos Vassilopoulos, 82, was adding up his monthly bills while sipping his coffee. The...

September 2022

Greek PM says pensions to rise for first time in more than a decade

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Saturday the minimum wage would rise again next year and pensions would be increased for the first time since the financial crisis erupted more than a decade ago. During his annual economic policy speech from the northern city of Thessaloniki, Mitsotakis said about 1.5 million pensioners would benefit from the increase. Read also Demographic change impacting asset allocation The conservative premier, who faces parliamentary elections in 2023, also announced a 1.8 billion euros ($1.8 billion)...

July 2022

Greece to allow pension increases from 2023, first since debt crisis- PM

Greece's Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis promised pension increases for the first time in more than a decade next year, saying Greece had definitively turned a page from the financial chaos which required three international bailouts. During its decade-long financial crisis that broke out in 2009, Greece was forced by its international lenders to slash pensions more than 10 times to reduce state spending and meet its fiscal targets. "Everyone must benefit from growth without threatening the fiscal balance or the country's...

May 2022

Greece. First year of pension increases after 12 years

“Next year will be the first year of increasing pensions for the first time, after 12 years,” Deputy Labor and Social Affairs Minister Panos Tsakloglou said in an interview with the Athens-Macedonian News Agency on Sunday, noting that the government has supported the income of pensioners in several ways. Tsakloglou also referred to the challenges he was called to face when he took over the post and focused on the emblematic, as he characterized it, reform in the architecture of...

February 2022

Reforming the Greek Pension System

By Daehaeng Kim, Alvar Kangur & Niki Kalavrezou The Greek pension system has been costly, complex, and distortive, which has contributed to Greece’s fiscal problems and discouraged labor force participation. Several attempts to reform the system faltered due to lack of implementation, pushback by vested interests, and court rulings leading to reversals. A series of reforms introduced throughout 2015–17 unified benefit and contribution rules, removed several distortions and reduced fragmentation and costs. If fully implemented throughout the long-term, these reforms...

November 2021

Low-income Greek pensioners to get one-off grant to buffer price surge

ATHENS- Greece will hand out one-off grants to low-income pensioners and medical staff ahead of Christmas to shield them from higher energy and food prices, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Monday. Consumer inflation hit a multi-year high of 3.4% in October with costs in the housing sector rising by an annual 7.8%, mainly due to rising electricity, heating oil and natural gas prices. The government has already spent about 700 million euros ($790 million)on subsidies for the majority of Greek...

October 2021

Greece on its Way to Becoming Fastest Aging Country in the EU

The population decline in Greece, which has been steady since 2011, will lead the country to having the oldest people in the EU by 2030. That is the conclusion of a report by Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, about the declining population in the Union. If the report’s predictions come true, Greece will take the aging lead over Italy in the EU. With half of Greeks already over 50 years old, EU Commission estimates that the country’s population will decrease...

August 2021

Greece. New pension scheme from 2022

Greece’s pension system will undergo a significant change on January 1, 2022, when funded supplementary pension body TEKA begins operation. The bill creating TEKA has cleared the parliamentary committee stage and is expected to be voted by the full Parliament as soon as it reconvenes on August 23. The change will not affect most current employees. But for those who enter the market in 2022 and beyond, the government claims it will mean that they are guaranteed to get full value...

February 2021

Greece’s number of retirees at poverty risk surprises

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, released new data today that measures how many pensioners are at risk of poverty, and their findings on Greece may very well surprise you. The statistical office said “In 2019, the proportion of pensioners aged over 65 at risk of poverty in the EU stood at 15.1%, slightly above the figure of 14.5% in 2018 as well as above the risk of poverty of working age population (16 to 64 years)...

September 2020

One in five retirees is under 65

More than one in every five pensioners in Greece is under the age of 64, according to the figures of the Helios pensions database for September. The Labor Ministry’s register has 2,486,053 retirees, of whom 559,079 or 22.48% are aged up to 64, thanks to the favorable retirement status granted to them by several social security funds and early retirement opportunities. The figures also showed that the average monthly main pension in Greece this month amounted to 726.70 euros,...