The significant progress made by Greece over the past decade in reforming the country’s state budget, as well as the need to transition from tools to decisions, were highlighted in a special study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which was presented at a conference in Athens.

Entitled “Implementing Budget Framework Reforms in Greece: Performance Budgeting, Spending and Revenue Reviews, and Integrating the Environmental Dimension into the Budget, the report states that Greece has moved from a budget that simply records expenditures to a system capable of evaluating efficiency as well as the impact of policies relative to their cost, through performance budgeting, the incorporation of an environmental dimension (green budgeting), and spending reviews.

During the presentation of the study by the OECD’s head of public governance and budgeting, Jón R. Blöndal, Greece was praised for “remarkable progress” and serves as a “source of inspiration” for other countries.

Based on the OECD report, Greece has completed the phase of institutional development of the new budget model. The next stage is more demanding: using the tools to shape policies, reallocate resources, and identify real savings. In other words, the success of the reform will now be judged not by how the budget is designed — but by how it is used.

Deputy Minister: ‘Four reforms in one’ strengthen resilience

This transition was described by the Deputy Minister of National Economy and Finance Thanos Petralias, who noted that it essentially consists of “four reforms in one”: performance budgeting, spending and revenue reviews, the integration of the environmental dimension (green budgeting), and the functional classification of expenditures through the international COFOG standard. These tools operate complementarily: data from performance budgeting feed into spending reviews, while functional classification enables international comparisons.