Greece’s recession is predicted to be at 1.5% in 2015 instead of 2.5%, said Economy Minister George Stathakis when addressing Greek Parliament in a debate on the government policies on Wednesday. He argued that the lowering from 2.5% was due to the higher-than-anticipated revenue from tourism and the less-than-expected repercussions from capital controls. Furthermore, Greece received an additional 4.5bln euros worth of funds from the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF).

He underlined that Greece’s recovery needs to be accompanied by strong social policy linked to five key areas:

1) the stabilization of the banking sector and the settlement of bad loans;
2) the use of funding tools and the development law to be voted on over the next month;
3) the creation of a development bank that would work as a funding tool until the implementation of the ‘Juncker plan’;
4) the unification of the public contracts;
5) the setting up of development council at the Finance ministry.