Cypriot Posts Third Year of Growth

Cypriot Finance Minister Harris Georgiades has said that he is satisfied with the state of the economy, noting that the growth rate in 2017 would reach 3.5%.

“The Cypriot economy has been through dramatically difficult conditions” said Georgiades in an interview with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, adding that “ominous” projections had been proven wrong. “We stayed in the eurozone, we rendered the Troika unnecessary and we are in the third year of recovery,” he said, Cyprus News Agency reported.

Asked how the Cypriot economy had managed to recover, the minister said that it was a result of the efforts of the private sector. “A government can either support these efforts or undermine them” he added.

Georgiades rejected tax hikes as a means of reducing deficits, stressing that in the case of Cyprus “what allowed us to eliminate the deficit and function with a totally balanced budget was not taxes but limiting public spending”. He added that the 2018 state budget, which would be submitted to the House in the coming days, would also be balanced.

As to the contribution of the exploitation of natural gas to the growth of the economy, Georgiades said that it was a significant but long-term return investment and in this sense “it cannot rid us of the difficult effort to consolidate and reform our economy”.

Meanwhile, Cyprus will for the first time, next month, host the Euro-Med Conference where the leaders of seven Mediterranean EU countries will gather on the island to discuss issues specifically related to their countries, such as migration.

The leaders of France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain are expected to attend the summit in Nicosia on October 10.