Listen, I'm looking forward to having a conversation about this very interesting economic journey that Greece has been on, as well as the sort of interesting position that Greece finds itself in in this fragile geopolitical world. But before we do that, I just wanted to start by saying that pretty much everyone I know, including myself, went to Greece this summer. It's like move over Italy, move over France, Greece is where everyone is going. So I'm just curious to know what have you done to encourage this boom, and also where did you go for your summer holiday?
I went to Greece. Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you for choosing Greece for your holidays. You're one of the 36 million people who decided to take the trip to Greece. And of course, tourism is the biggest sector in Greece, not the only one, but the biggest sector. And we're very happy that more people choose Greece, especially more people from the United States. We've had more than 100, I think, weekly flights into Athens, non-stop flights from the US. We've really opened up the US market, and this has been very encouraging for Greek tourism.
For us, when we think about tourism, the real challenge is to balance growth with sustainability and well-paying jobs, and to encourage also a young generation of Greeks to enter the services industry. And I think so far we've done a reasonably good job in terms of investing in higher-end tourism. This is always a challenge, and to ensure that whatever gets built or renovated meets very high sustainability criteria. It's not always easy because the Greek brand was more of a mass tourism brand, and of course mass tourism is still an important contributor, but we really want to move the product upmarket. We want to open up new destinations. I was very glad that you actually went to a place in northern Greece that is not particularly well-known, and I'm very happy that more visitors discover the Greek mainland and don't just limit their Greek experiences to Santorini and Mykonos.
So our challenge is to extend the season. We don't just want the tour season to last for three months. This is creating lots of seasonality problems. And if you look at, for example, the numbers for this year, October looks like a booming month. We're extending the season into November, and we hope that the season can actually start in March. And of course, we're also marketing not just Athens, but some of our main cities, including Thessaloniki, which is the second-largest city, as a year-round destination. It seems to be gaining lots of traction. So I'm happy about the results. I was looking at the numbers through July. This is going to be a record-breaking year, not just in terms of arrivals, but particularly in terms of revenues. Tourism brings in more than 20 billion euros in terms of revenues for the economy, and this is going to be another record-breaking year.
So on the issue of the economy then, of which tourism plays an important part, I want to talk about this remarkable journey. Ten years ago, Greece was on the brink of a huge default, crashing out of the euro. Since then, it's been 10 years. You now have one of the fastest-growing economies in the EU. You're running budget surpluses. My question is, is Greece back?
It certainly is back. I think all the numbers confirm that, but the journey and the story that Greece is telling, I think, is also relevant for a broader European and maybe even a global audience. It is a contrarian story if you think about where we were 10 years ago. The Greek 10-year bond was around 9.5%, and the French 10-year bond was at 1%. Today, Greece is borrowing cheaper than France and Italy, and not many people would have placed that bet even two or three years ago.
So this has been a remarkable, in my mind, turnaround story. It has been a story that has focused on macroeconomic stability. Greece is producing not just primary, but also real surpluses. In that sense, we're the exception to the European rule. If you look at the number of countries that are currently under European surveillance, that sort of tells the story of the problems that European economies are facing. We are not in that position. We're producing surpluses that allow us to further cut taxes, support the middle class, and create a virtuous cycle where growth brings in more revenue, which allows us again to cut more taxes and to invest in our public services. So I think we've broken out of the habits of the past. It took some difficult and painful reforms to actually do that. It's always difficult to explain to people that you have to produce a surplus because we still have to bring our debt down.
But if you look at the pace at which we have reduced our debt, it's been pretty impressive. This is the fastest reduction of debt-to-GDP of any OECD country, and this has been reflected in the way the markets have treated it. But this is primarily an investment growth; it should not be a consumption-led growth. And it's also a growth that is slowly but steadily changing the fabric of the economy itself, from an economy that was very dependent on tourism to an economy that is also attracting investment in other sectors where we have a comparative advantage. We brought in more than 30 billion of foreign direct investment over the past six years. If you look at the past 20 years, that number was under 30 billion. So in five years, we did better than Greece had done in 20 years when it comes to foreign direct investment. We still have challenges that, of course, we need to address—improve productivity, address labor shortage challenges—but I prefer to have that problem than the opposite, because when I took over, unemployment was at 18% and youth unemployment was at 30%. And now unemployment is at 8%. And employers are telling me that they cannot find skilled workers, whereas six years ago, young people couldn't find a job.
It has undoubtedly been an incredible turnaround. But it is the case that, as I understand it, Greece's GDP is still below the level it was at in 2008, and you are still one of the poorest countries in the EU. So it suggests to me—and there are two particular issues I wanted to ask you about which represent challenges: one is the COVID funds that you got from the EU, which have been suffusing the economy, but which end next year. So that's one challenge. The other one, of course, is this tourism boom. It's wonderful, but tourism is fickle. There's an element of revenge tourism still post-the-pandemic. How are you going to tackle these two challenges? And also, even if your turnaround has been great, structurally the economy still has a way to go based on some of these economic indicators.
I think you're right to point out that we still have significant challenges ahead of us. I think the comparison to the 2008 numbers, in my mind, is not particularly relevant. Why? Because if you look at the numbers before we went bankrupt, they didn't really reflect the health of the economy, because we ended up going bankrupt because we were spending more than we could actually afford. So when people ask me about these numbers, I tell them, yes, but this was a debt-fueled, consumption-driven growth, and we don't want to go back to those days. So yes, we're catching up with Europe, and this has been my main target: convergence with Europe. We need to grow faster than the eurozone average in order to be able to do that. We also need to reduce income inequality. We focused a lot on minimum wage. If you look at the minimum wage, it was €650 when I came into power; it's at €880 now. So we rank 11th in Europe. We have clearly tried to focus on those who have a difficulty in making ends meet.
Now to the challenges that you pointed out. The COVID funds, what we call NextGenerationEU, has been a big boom for the Greek economy because it has allowed us to invest in various sectors which are critical, but also to improve our public services. Yes, they do come to an end in 2026, but there are still significant structural funds available to Greece and new funds which are related to climate change and social solidarity which we can tap in. So there's not going to be a sudden stop of EU funds. But for me, the main goal was to ensure that we absorb all the COVID funds and that they can actually help us in improving our competitiveness. I think we've done a good job in doing that.
Now coming back to tourism, we have tried very hard to present an image of an economy to foreign investors that is well diversified. And if you look at other sectors that attract foreign direct investment, this, I think, points to the argument that Greece is not totally dependent on tourism: renewable energy, logistics and infrastructure, agrifood and the agricultural sector. Greece is exporting 8 billion euros of agricultural goods, and we still have significant room to improve in terms of addressing productivity issues in our agricultural sector. Healthcare services, education—we're opening up our education market to non-profit private investors. I envision that Greece can become a regional healthcare and education center. And of course, technology. What's happening in tech has been pretty impressive. Out of the crisis emerged an ecosystem of young technology-driven entrepreneurs who have been doing great things in Greece. And for us, the fact that we have a dynamic diaspora is a tremendous comparative advantage. I don't want to get too much into US domestic politics, but what I can tell you is that we've seen a lot of interest by Greeks and Greek founders to bring their tech teams back to Greece, because we want to open up our economy to foreign talent, but we want to do it in an organized and disciplined way.
That's an interesting thought there. So as I understand it, the tech sector, the size of it in the Greek economy is roughly 3%. You've talked about making it 10%. Because obviously there was a brain drain after the financial crisis, are you telling me that lots of young dynamic Greeks who left for the US, set up their own companies, are now going to bring those back?
What I'm saying is that for the first time, we see more people returning to Greece than Greeks leaving Greece. We're reversing the trend, and this is very encouraging.
Are they all coming back from the US, or—
No, they're coming back from Europe; some of them are coming back from the US. But what Greece offers now is good job opportunities, and I think an overall stable climate of political and economic predictability. If you want to take your family and return to Greece, this is a long-term, important family decision, so you want to be certain that you're doing the right thing.
How long then do you think for you to get from 3% to 10%?
Well, it's probably going to take us a decade to do that. But what I do see is an incredible appetite for investments in tech. All the big hyperscalers are already all in Greece. We are an attractive destination for data centers. For the moment, we're building medium-sized data centers, but we're also looking at giga data centers. And of course, the fact that we have access to amazing talent helps us in pitching Greece as an investment destination. And if you look at the AI ecosystem, Greece is overrepresented in terms of AI scientists in the top institutions. One of the reasons companies look to set up shop in Greece is because they have access to excellent human capital.
What about the issues around—a characterization of Greece has often been a lot of red tape, a lot of bureaucracy. It takes too long to get permits. I read somewhere that it took Microsoft four years to get a building permit for a data center it wanted to build there. How are you tackling that particular point?
I think it's a fair criticism, and we're constantly working to reduce bureaucracy and red tape. I think we have made significant improvements by digitizing the interaction between the state and citizens and businesses. This has been a huge story, a very successful story of digital transformation, and it's been also recognized in Europe as an example of how one can make the public administration more efficient. And of course, AI is offering huge opportunities in terms of automating repetitive tasks and making sure our civil servants focus on what is really important. Of course, many other challenges with AI, but we are very much on top of the agenda of how AI can improve the business of government. So we've set up a special unit at my office to look at these types of projects, and we're working with all the big companies who are interested in testing their ideas in Greece.
So yes, there is still room to improve when it comes to red tape. But for example, we have just codified our building legislation. This may sound like a trivial exercise, but before, we had building laws that went back a hundred years, and now everything is going to be in one code. These are the sort of mundane, boring changes that actually make a big difference when it comes to doing business in the country.
Is that going to help with the housing crisis? Because I know housing is a big issue, particularly for young Greeks.
Housing is probably the biggest issue that we're facing right now, and we recognize that Greece is also facing a cost-of-living crisis. Of course wages have gone up, but in our case, we have just come out of a profound crisis, and of course for those young people who are on rent, housing is a big burden. Five years ago, this was not an issue because the housing market essentially tanked during the crisis. But as the economy is growing, real estate prices went up. So we need to address this problem both from the supply and the demand point of view. We are, for example, offering—because our economy is doing well, we can afford to offer targeted support for people who are on rent in November. We're returning one rent to everyone in Greece, so essentially we're reducing rent by 8%.
And of course, we want to make sure that we help young people. We're offering very generous tax breaks. I just announced that anyone in Greece under 25 with income under 20,000, which is 99% of young Greeks working, is going to pay zero income tax. Zero. And if you are between 25 and 30, your income tax is going to be reduced from 22% to 9%. So we're really sending a signal to young people who view the political establishment with a lot of distrust that we care about you, and if the economy is overperforming, we can use this surplus to make sure that we support those who are in greater need.
But of course, when you look at the supply of housing, I think for us the biggest opportunity is to make sure that we bring back to the market housing stock, especially apartments in our big cities that during the crisis were run down, and we need to make sure that we renovate them. We offer incentives for people to renovate their apartments. We offer incentives for people to convert their rental agreements from short-term to long-term agreements. I think the question of short-term rentals, what we call the Airbnb problem, is going to be addressed in a more substantive manner, because it's clear to me that, certainly in certain destinations, short-term rentals are crowding out long-term rentals. And this, of course, is restricting the supply of housing, driving up prices.
So you talk about the importance of stability, political stability, but Greece, like a lot of other European countries, is facing challenges of populism, particularly from the far right. How does a country like Greece—and you heard what President Trump said yesterday about Europe going to hell—how does a country like Greece, or how do you think Europe should tackle the challenges that it faces when it comes to populist parties? And do you agree with—
Greece is certainly not going to hell. We may not be going to heaven, but we are doing much better than many other European countries. But of course, as you pointed out, we start from a lower base. Two points: first of all, on populism, Greece experimented with populism in 2015. We were way ahead of the curve. We elected a populist government, and we paid a very heavy price: a third program, and essentially we delayed our exit from the crisis by four years. So these memories are still present in Greece. Of course, people do tend to forget, and we need to remind them how things were a decade ago and what progress we have made, because no progress is irreversible in a democracy.
Having said that, we won a second mandate by doing what we thought was the right thing, and by speaking truth to people, and by not engaging in populist policies. So we demonstrated that you can actually win an election, and hopefully we're going to win another election because we are right now, if you look at the polls, way ahead of the second party. Granted, we are also in our seventh year; there are some reasonable complaints by people, but we're still the only political power in Greece that has a plan for the country. But of course, the battle with populists is a continuous one, and this is a war that we need to constantly wage. And the only way for establishment, moderate parties to win that battle is by demonstrating that we listen to people, we take their concerns seriously, because the grievances upon which populists feed are reasonable grievances. If a young person is telling me that, 'Look, I'm still living with my parents because I can't find a house,' or if there are reasonable concerns with healthcare, we need to address these problems.
If people feel that they have a government that's trying—it may not solve all problems—that's honest, when we make mistakes we tell them, 'Look, there are issues which we didn't tackle as successfully as we could.' At the end of the day, when I'm going to present our record in 2027—that's when we have our next elections—I will ask people to look back: What did I tell them in 2023? What did I deliver in 2027? Have I done a reasonable job? What's my plan for the future? In my mind, that's the only way to debunk populists.
Of course, this brings us also to the question of running a government, being a moderate party in the era of social media and AI. This is a huge challenge because these tools, I think, play directly into the hands of populists. They feed upon negative emotion.
But you're taking this on. I understand you're a big TikToker yourself.
I am. If you can't beat them, join them. So I did use TikTok.
