Greek Development Minister Takis Theodorikakos said Greece by 2030 should be a country with factories that modernize quickly and without bureaucratic obstacles. He made the comments in an interview with journalist Evi Papadosifaki of the Athens-Macedonian News Agency.
Theodorikakos said Greece of 2030 should also be a country with businesses that merge and grow, with new scientists and technicians who see a future in production, and with investments that stay in the country and build know-how from Evros to Crete, reducing regional inequalities.
Columnist Giorgos Kraloglou, writing for Capital.gr, said the minister's remarks confirmed his grasp of industry's needs and the concerns raised by industry representatives when asked about investment. But Kraloglou said the minister did not explain why the investors and volume of investment that Greece has awaited for more than 15 years have still not materialized.
Old plants and abandoned land
Kraloglou argued that when discussing investment from industry and small and medium-sized businesses, the conversation should not stop at the buying and selling of old plants, plots and land, the kind that closed 30 to 40 years ago and now form the familiar image of derelict industrial buildings along the national highways near Thessaloniki and Patras.
He said the 2030 vision the minister described would need to be ready within a four-year period, delivering the services and incentives the government is presenting as its industrial policy for investors at that time.
Five questions for the minister
Kraloglou then posed five questions about the plan, saying he hoped he was wrong.
First, he said turning Greece into a country of fast-modernizing, low-bureaucracy factories would require a national policy built on political consensus, since without it a future New Democracy government could easily reverse the changes, something he said had happened before. He questioned whether such a consensus policy was anything more than what he called a cold joke in Greece.
Second, he asked whether the current government would have time to replace the chaos it has maintained through seven years in power, along with the tangle of procedures, particularly licensing, that he described as the leading disincentive to attracting investment.
Third, he asked whether the change would happen immediately, within the time left before elections, or whether the business community would need to hope the government stays in power longer in order to take industrial and investment modernization seriously.
Fourth, he asked how the Ministry of Development would respond to what he called certain rejection from the opposition if the ministry scrapped the current investment policy framework and opened new routes for capital to enter the country.
Fifth, he asked whether the Greek state, which he said keeps overall control, would allow the government to hand production over to an oligarchy. He said the answer might lie in what he called the canned slogans repeated by all political parties, which he argued keep investment legislation at a primitive level.
