Debt forgiveness is not the solution for Greece

by Daniel Gros

Centre for European Policy Studies
May 23, 2017

A superficially plausible narrative to the continuing problems besetting Greece is that it cannot recover because of a crushing debt burden. However, this narrative overlooks some basic facts and cannot explain why all the other peripheral countries that needed official support (Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus) are recovering.

The key to understanding Greece’s debt situation is that most of it is owed to the European institutions, which have already extended the maturity to over 30 years and are charging very low interest rates. Expenditure on interest now amounts to 3.2% of GDP, which is much less than what the Greek government had to spend on interest before the crisis and before the Troika! Interest expenditure is also lower for Greece than for Italy (3.9% of GDP) and much less than for Portugal (4.2% of GDP). Even the US government has to spend more on interest (3.8% of GDP) than the Greek government. But nobody argues that these countries need debt forgiveness to be able to grow.

An implicit conclusion from the fact that interest is not an important cost item despite high debt is that debt forgiveness makes little difference at low interest rates. Let us assume that the official European lenders were to forgive Greece €100 billion, undeniably a huge sum. What would this change? This huge concession would save the Greek government a little over €1 billion in interest payments each year, which represents less than 1% of the country’s GDP. Savings of this order of magnitude are unlikely to make much of a difference.

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