Stoil Topalov

The US president Barack Obama signed a stimulus plan for nearly $800 billion. Unfortunately, here in Greece not much was heard about it, which was a mistake, because this plan might affect the country directly or at least it will definitely affect the Greek economy.

One of the reasons is the fact that the Greek economy depends too much on tourism but everything point at the fact that tourism is decreasing this year. Based on a research done by Eurobank, the USA, Great Britain, and Germany are the countries, which send the most tourists yearly to Greece. Those countries are also the ones worst hit by the crisis. During the economic crisis, the tourist activity decreases throughout the whole world and especially when we are talking about favorite destinations like USA-Greece. This why the support, which the $800 billion plan will provide the US economy with, will directly affect how many tourists will visit Greece from the US in the upcoming years.

The other reason is trade or more precisely, export from the US and EU countries, like GB, Germany and Italy, who buy around 30% of the general Greek export - bad news, when you keep in mind that Germany is living through the worst recession since the unification of the country in 1990.

Greek export to the USA has decreased with 5% compared to 2007 and it is expected to fall even more in 2009. After Obama’s administration set the $800 billion plan for reconstructing of US’ economy, there is still hope. Most political analyzers believe that during the second half of 2009 we can expect search growth in the biggest world economy, which will bring to life the falling trade not only with countries  like Great Britain and Germany but also with smaller ones like Greece.

The hope is that this will help Greece’s GDP growth, which the central bank announced to be 3.1% during 2008. This percentage is expected to drop to 0.5% this year and it is also supposed to decrease the trade deficit of Greece, which is ?33 billion and is the fourth highest in the EU.

Meanwhile, the Greek stock exchange continued to fall and the main index dropped to level unseen since 2003 – 1599 points. Since the beginning of this year, the Athens index lost 12.20%. The US exchanges also answered very skeptically to Obama’s stimulus plan, after Dow Jones and S&P had losses.