by Maria Spiliopoulou
ATHENS, May 1 (Xinhua) -- Greece is exiting the painful bailout programs this summer after eight difficult years of acute debt crisis, wiser and with good prospects for the future which can be constructed on the foundations of a new growth model, Greek Economy and Development Deputy Minister Stergios Pitsiorlas told Xinhua here on Monday.
After an unprecedented fiscal adjustment and much needed reforms to fix structural problems of the ailing economy, economic indexes in Greece look good in recent months. For the first time in 2017 the country posted remarkable growth rates and the outlook seems positive.
"We have laid the foundations for a more stable growth prospect for our country," Pitsiorlas said, noting that one of these foundations is Greece's relationship with China and the development of investments in Greece by foreign companies and foreign countries.
"Greece has learnt a lot from the crisis it has gone through, has achieved an impressive adjustment, but at the same time has suffered an enormous social cost...It will take years to balance all this, " the deputy minister explained when asked whether Greek people will feel the difference of the post-bailout era soon.
"What we have to keep is that for us the crisis we have been through has been a great lesson that our economy must become more competitive and more extrovert," he underlined.
"We missed the train in the early 2000s. We were not able to anticipate the developments that were coming and get prepared. We were living with the illusion of fake prosperity," Pitsiorlas said, recalling what went wrong and Greece was brought to the brink of financial meltdown.
"Competitiveness and extroversion are now the main objectives and from our side we are pushing and insisting as a government that the new period of economic development should be combined with a fairer distribution of the resources this development brings and with a better functioning of the civil service," he said.
In the context of extroversion Greece aims to capitalize on its geographical position and benefit from the strategies of countries which see the world economy with another perspective, he explained, pointing to China.
