‘Camp’ Stournara: “We lack 200,000 hands in tourism, agriculture and construction”

A sound warning addressed in an article to “Sunday Daily” (10.03. 24) the Governor of the Bank of Greece, in relation to the lack of labour in our country. Typically, Giannis Stournaras pointed out “a problem that we will find in front of us if we do not tackle it quickly: the lack of labour. We are currently lacking 200,000 hands in tourism, agriculture and construction activities. If we don’t find them immediately we’ll start having a problem in the economy too.” The Commander stressed that “in the 1990s, in the convergence process, foreign workers kept inflation in Greece low. Most people think our problem was mostly the public sector deficit. It wasn’t the most important thing. It was inflation, because we had an economy that started with interest rates at 19% to decrease to about 4%. This large interest rate reduction overheated the economy and increased all values. If we did not have immigrants in the agricultural sector and in the construction sector, then we would not have achieved the inflation criterion.”