Athens' resourceful accounting

During their Monday meeting in Brussels, eurozone finance ministers were to deal with the country logging the highest level of public debt in the 28-member European Union at more than 170 percent of gross domestic product.

Greece has been one of the nations worst hit by the euro area's economic crisis, but hopes have been high in Athens of turning the corner.

In a gesture to prove the nation's recent progress, Greece has resumed borrowing on financial markets, and more importantly, it has reported a primary surplus after almost a decade of shortfalls.

By definition, a primary surplus means the nation has collected more than it spent in a given year, interest payments excluded.

Cooking the books?

Two weeks ago, the European Commission said Athens managed to achieve a surplus of 1.5 billion euros ($2.08 billion) in 2013 and could now hope for further support from its creditors. Help would likely include lower interest rates on debt and a longer debt repayment period.

But a number of economists warned ahead of the meeting in Brussels that Greece's primary surplus was merely the result of very resourceful accounting applied with the knowledge of, and endorsed by, the creditors themselves - notably the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Even Greek economists acknowledged their country had a primary deficit of 16 billion euros last year, but the Troika of creditors agreed to not include one-off items in the calculation, such as a special 19.7-billion-euro shot in the arm for Greece's ailing banks.

"You can always make a budget sheet look good by just ignoring a number of spending items," said the president of the Munich-based IFO economic think tank, Hans-Werner Sinn. But applying such methods is not very helpful as it distracts people's attention away from the huge debt load Greece is still grappling with, he added.

hg /nz (dpa, Spiegel Online)