A debate that comes up again and again is whether the party programs or some of their proposals and measures they formulate are adequately cost-assessed.
On a sensitive issue like the cost of party proposals, one can only trust an independent authority, such as the Fiscal Council
Obviously, politics cannot and should not be a cost-benefit accounting exercise, yet there is no doubt that the effects of one or another proposal on the country’s fiscal situation must be known and taken into account for its democratic approval or rejection – especially after the prolonged and severe suffering that Greece went through in the previous decade. But this, theoretically simple, is practically anything but as easy as it sounds.
For some individual measures, calculations are relatively simple. If, however, a political party wants to assess the fiscal cost of a complex proposal or, much more, let alone of the economic policy it has designed as a whole, that’s a different proposition. The responsibility for costing the policy proposals formulated by parties has been legislatively assigned to the Hellenic Fiscal Council, an independent authority that was established in 2014 and started operating in 2015, following the model of such authorities established in most EU member states since 2010.
