Greece
Profile written September 2026 · figures updated nightly
Where things stand
The latest published reading for each measure, with the last five years beside it.
the ECB's rate, which Greece has shared since 2001
01Structure
Greece earns its living abroad in two ways that have little to do with each other. Tourism brings more than thirty million visitors a year to a country of about ten million,1 and Greek owners control roughly a fifth of the world's merchant shipping fleet — an industry that is Greek by ownership rather than by location, and that is taxed on tonnage rather than on profit.
What is thin is industry: manufacturing is about a tenth of value added, the lowest share of any economy on this site, and research spending is among the lowest in the European Union. The decade after 2010 removed capacity that has not returned, which is why the level of Greek output still sits below where it stood before the crisis.
02Trade and exposure
Exports are a little under two fifths of output, and services — shipping receipts and tourism — carry most of them. Both are earned in foreign currency and both are highly cyclical: a global freight downturn and a European travel downturn each reach Greek income directly.
Goods exports are concentrated in refined petroleum, food and aluminium. Refining makes the trade balance move with oil prices in both directions at once, since the crude is imported and the product exported.
03Energy and resources
Greece imports close to four fifths of the energy it uses, among the highest dependencies in the European Union. Domestic lignite, long the backbone of Greek electricity, is being retired, and wind and solar have been built quickly in its place.
The country's location has turned that dependency into a business: LNG terminals and interconnectors make Greece a route through which gas reaches the Balkans and south-eastern Europe, which is a different position from being merely at the end of a pipeline.
04Labour and demography
About seventy-one per cent of 20- to 64-year-olds are in work, the lowest rate of any economy on this site apart from Italy, and youth unemployment runs near seventeen per cent. Unemployment fell a long way from its crisis peak, and the ten-year average behind the figure in the panel above is far higher than the figure itself.
The lasting damage is in who left. Emigration during the crisis years removed a large share of a cohort of graduates, and that loss shows up now as a shortage of skilled workers rather than as unemployment.
05Public finances
Greece carries the highest public debt ratio in the euro area,2 the legacy of the crisis and of the restructuring that followed rather than of current spending: the budget has run primary surpluses in most recent years, and a surplus overall in 2025.
Two things make that debt less fragile than the ratio suggests. Most of it is owed to official European creditors on very long maturities at low fixed rates, so refinancing risk is limited for years ahead; and Greece regained an investment-grade credit rating in 2023 and now funds itself in the markets again.2 The ratio is falling steadily, though from the highest starting point in the currency area.
06Money and prices
Greece has set no policy rate of its own since 2001, two years after the first eleven members; the rate shown above is the European Central Bank's. No member has a sharper illustration of what the common currency costs and provides: a decade of internal devaluation because the exchange rate could not do the work, and then a rescue that a country outside the union would have had to negotiate alone.
With bank balance sheets repaired and the sovereign spread over German bonds narrow again, ECB decisions now reach Greece much as they reach other members — which was not true for most of the last fifteen years.
07What the models expect
These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.
Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.96 on consumer price inflation, 2.81 on real gdp, 0.70 on unemployment rate, 0.60 on central bank policy rate, 11.82 on government debt.
08Structural indicators
The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.
| Measure | Value | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industry, share of gross value added | 10.5% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Exports, share of GDP | 39.5% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Energy import dependency | 77.7% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| R&D spending, share of GDP | 1.5% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| Employment rate, ages 20–64 | 71.0% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Youth unemployment rate | 16.8% | Jul 2026 | Eurostat |
| Government balance | +1.7% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Share of world merchant fleet, Greek-owned | ~20% | 2026 | industry estimates |
09Sources and method
Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-12, next review September 2027.
- Tourism volumes and the shipping industry — Greece Economy 2026
- The debt ratio, the primary surpluses and the return to investment grade — OECD Economic Outlook 2026/1, Greece; Reuters via Global Banking and Finance