Austerity

The government plans an early repayment of up to €5 billion of bailout loans to eurozone countries this year, two government officials told Reuters on Tuesday.

The eurozone and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lent Greece about €280 billion during the crisis on the condition that it impose tough austerity measures.

A dramatic demographic deterioration was one of the many factors that contributed to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the collapse of the centuries-old Byzantine Empire. The city's population had shrunk dramatically, and especially with regard to younger age groups.

A decade ago, Greece was in the throes of a devastating debt crisis marked by years of austerity, hardship and unrest. Now, officials and investors say 2024 could be the year its rebound is finally complete.

The Greek economy is forecast to grow nearly 3% this year, approaching its pre-crisis size of 2009 and far outpacing the euro zone average of 0.8%.

Ships remained docked at Greek ports and train services were halted on Wednesday as transport workers joined a 24-hour strike by private workers to demand higher pay to cope with rising living costs.

Bus and taxi drivers also walked off the job for a few hours as part of the labor action called by Greece's largest private sector union GSEE.

Nominal wage increases should not be excessive and should be proportionate to economy's ability to sustain them, the Greek Parliament's Budget Office warned in a report released on Monday on the fourth quarter of 2023.

When a law abolishing the Workers' Housing Organization was passed in 2012 as part of a package of stringent austerity measures, Greece gave up the last tool of state intervention in the real estate market.

If the Bank of Greece were not independent, Greece might have exited the eurozone in 2015, Yannis Stournaras, then as now the central bank's governor, said Saturday.

Former prime minister Alexis Tsipras has said he never contemplated taking Greece out of the European Union or dropping its common currency when he called the 2015 referendum.

"Not even for a moment did it cross my mind to negotiate the country's presence in the EU and use of the euro," he told the final day of the "50 Years of the Metapolitefsi" conference.

One of the key figures of the 2009-2018 Greek debt crisis, Germany's former finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, died on Tuesday. It is a development that appears almost symbolic in this country, as the deep wounds inflicted on its economy during that period, leading to a loss of a quarter of its output, have gradually started to heal.

Wolfgang Schaeuble, who helped negotiate German reunification in 1990 and as finance minister was a central figure in the austerity-heavy effort to drag Europe out of its debt crisis more than two decades later, has died. He was 81.

Schaeuble died at home on Tuesday evening, his family told German news agency dpa on Wednesday.