ATHENS – “The year 2022 will be one of historic records for both foreign direct investment in Greece and for exports,” Finance Minister Christos Staikouras said on Tuesday during his speech at the “Naftemporiki” conference entitled “Greek Economy & Entrepreneurship: Challenges and Opportunities in an Unpredictable Future!” Referring to the performance of the Greek economy, he said this proved that entrepreneurship and the state, working together, were able to contain the unprecedented challenges to a satisfactory degree.

According to the minister, “the country has faced challenges and opportunities in the past, it is facing them today and it will face challenges and opportunities in the future. The issue is how entrepreneurship and the economic system work together to seize the opportunities and contain the challenges as much as possible.”

He added that “we also had opportunities in the past with a favourable European environment, but at that time for four years we had approximately zero rates of economic growth.”

Staikouras noted that “a key issue in the exercise of economic policy is for the country to achieve high rates of economic growth. We have done better than the European average”. And he quoted the forecasts of the European Commission, saying that “according to the European Commission, Greece will have twice the economic growth rate this year than the average European and next year, a more difficult year for Europe, Greece will have three times the rate of economic growth. That is, every year we are doing better and better than the European average. This is an element of collective success.”

Finally, he underlined that “2022 will be a record year for foreign direct investment in Greece, as well as for exports. According to the European Commission, Greece will be the champion among all the countries of the European Union in the period 2022-2024 in terms of investment growth rate”. While, in terms of export activity, he noted that “Greece has exports as a percentage of GDP at around 41%, exceeding countries such as Italy, France and Spain and approaching countries such as Portugal.”