Greece’s “growth dividend” does not seem to cover the burden on the cost of living even for 2027, which means that hundreds of thousands of citizens risk seeing a percentage increase in their net income that is lower than that of inflation.
Does Greece ultimately suffer from higher inflation than comparable European countries? Nothing of the sort emerges, at least if one takes into account Eurostat statistics: The cumulative increase in consumer prices in the 2021-25 period is estimated at 21.4% for Greece, compared to a somewhat smaller increase in Portugal (20.5%) and a slightly higher increase in Spain (21.9%). The cumulative increase in consumer prices was, moreover, higher for the eurozone as a whole (22.6%).
Greece deviates significantly in terms of the disposable income of the typical consumer. For 2025, the median equivalent disposable income in this country is estimated by Eurostat at 60.8% of the EU average. In Spain and Portugal it reaches 98.6% and 76.5%, respectively, of the European average.
That is despite the fact that in the five-year period 2021-25, the median disposable income increased cumulatively in Greece by 33.8%; the improvement was slower than that in Spain (34.2%) and Portugal (35%), resulting in Greece’s income gap widening even further.
