ATHENS — "The 'Greece 2.0' programme is a coherent plan for investments and reforms that aims to update Greece's 'software and hardware' – to speak the language of young people – as it is a plan for the future," Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister Akis Skertsos said on Wednesday, during the presentation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.

"It is something like the updates that come to our mobile phone," Skertsos said and added: "The goal is to create the best version of our country."

In addition, he described the timing of the plan as "ideal", as it coincides with the 200-year anniversary of the Greeks' struggle for independence and the founding of the Greek State.

The fundamental difference between this six-year development plan and equivalent programmes in the past, Skertsos explained, is that "before today, we would first secure funds from Europe and only then start to think about what to do with them. The goal, almost an end in itself, was absorption for absorption's sake. Not a lasting developmental result. This method has certainly endowed us with better infrastructure until today, but failed to provide answers to the permanent structural problems of our country."

On the contrary, he added, "the architecture of the Recovery Fund is exactly the opposite. In other words, we first had to present to our partners our own, 'Greek-owned', coherent development plan, sufficiently justified and costed, and then to claim the resources to finance it."