May 2022
25May

Greece. First year of pension increases after 12 years

“Next year will be the first year of increasing pensions for the first time, after 12 years,” Deputy Labor and Social Affairs Minister Panos Tsakloglou said in an interview with the Athens-Macedonian News Agency on Sunday, noting that the government has supported the income of pensioners in several ways. Tsakloglou also referred to the challenges he was called to face when he took over the post and focused on the emblematic, as he characterized it, reform in the architecture of...

May 25, 2022
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February 2022
11Feb

Reforming the Greek Pension System

By Daehaeng Kim, Alvar Kangur & Niki Kalavrezou The Greek pension system has been costly, complex, and distortive, which has contributed to Greece’s fiscal problems and discouraged labor force participation. Several attempts to reform the system faltered due to lack of implementation, pushback by vested interests, and court rulings leading to reversals. A series of reforms introduced throughout 2015–17 unified benefit and contribution rules, removed several distortions and reduced fragmentation and costs. If fully implemented throughout the long-term, these reforms...

February 11, 2022
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November 2021
23Nov

Low-income Greek pensioners to get one-off grant to buffer price surge

ATHENS- Greece will hand out one-off grants to low-income pensioners and medical staff ahead of Christmas to shield them from higher energy and food prices, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Monday. Consumer inflation hit a multi-year high of 3.4% in October with costs in the housing sector rising by an annual 7.8%, mainly due to rising electricity, heating oil and natural gas prices. The government has already spent about 700 million euros ($790 million)on subsidies for the majority of Greek...

November 23, 2021
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October 2021
22Oct

Greece on its Way to Becoming Fastest Aging Country in the EU

The population decline in Greece, which has been steady since 2011, will lead the country to having the oldest people in the EU by 2030. That is the conclusion of a report by Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, about the declining population in the Union. If the report’s predictions come true, Greece will take the aging lead over Italy in the EU. With half of Greeks already over 50 years old, EU Commission estimates that the country’s population will decrease...

October 22, 2021
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August 2021
18Aug

Greece. New pension scheme from 2022

Greece’s pension system will undergo a significant change on January 1, 2022, when funded supplementary pension body TEKA begins operation. The bill creating TEKA has cleared the parliamentary committee stage and is expected to be voted by the full Parliament as soon as it reconvenes on August 23. The change will not affect most current employees. But for those who enter the market in 2022 and beyond, the government claims it will mean that they are guaranteed to get full value...

August 18, 2021
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February 2021
04Feb

Greece’s number of retirees at poverty risk surprises

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, released new data today that measures how many pensioners are at risk of poverty, and their findings on Greece may very well surprise you. The statistical office said “In 2019, the proportion of pensioners aged over 65 at risk of poverty in the EU stood at 15.1%, slightly above the figure of 14.5% in 2018 as well as above the risk of poverty of working age population (16 to 64 years)...

February 4, 2021
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September 2020

30Sep

One in five retirees is under 65

More than one in every five pensioners in Greece is under the age of 64, according to the figures of the Helios pensions database for September. The Labor Ministry’s register has 2,486,053 retirees, of whom 559,079 or 22.48% are aged up to 64, thanks to the favorable retirement status granted to them by several social security funds and early retirement opportunities. The figures also showed that the average monthly main pension in Greece this month amounted to 726.70 euros,...

September 30, 2020
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25Sep

Greece. Funded pension plan for more workers

The Labor and Social Security Ministry is examining the idea of granting younger workers – with few years of labor in the current social security system – the option of choosing to join the new funded auxiliary pension system, the very system that new entrants in the labor market must now enter by law. The same option, per the proposals examined at the General Secretariat for Social Security, will also be offered to any groups of workers who have...

September 25, 2020
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07Sep

Greece.Pay as you go for auxiliary pensions

The government’s major social security reform will be promoted in 2021, following the necessary economic and actuarial studies and public consultation. Its main focus will be on the creation of a deposit system in auxiliary pensions. This is based on the idea that the contributions of salary workers who have just entered the system will not be used for the payment of today’s auxiliary pensions, but instead form the pension capital of each individual worker. The changes will be...

September 7, 2020
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August 2020

25Aug

Greece. Wave of Pension Applications Swamp Overwhelmed Greek System

Greece's New Democracy government, which said retroactive pension payments ordered by the country's highest administrative court would begin in September, is also being hit with a deluge of applications for new pensions. The backlog could hit more than 300,000, said Kathimerini, and return the country to when beneficiaries had to wait two years or longer for their first check and were barred under law from working during that time. There was a big jump in people filing in January...

August 25, 2020
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