Les Manison

Government more interested in pleasing credit-rating agencies than citizen welfare By Les Manison In presenting the government budget for 2023 to the House of Representatives the minister of finance, Constantinos Petrides, ...

The prospect of a recession in Cyprus is a distinct possibility According to the latest Eurobarometer by the European Commission seven out of ten Cypriots describe the economic situation of ...

Cyprus borrowed heavily with low-cost bond issues to finance their excessive current expenditures Economic and financial crises in the euro area are fast developing. With supply-side problems most strikingly reflected ...

It is ludicrous for the government to claim that it does not have the resources to meet the needs of vulnerable households Accounts and behaviour of the government, banks and ...

Gaps between private and public workers as well as between generations grow ever wider By Les Manison Labour, particularly private sector employees, and the young generation have suffered badly under ...

Given that consumer prices will continue to rise over the coming months with increases in incomes falling far behind, even lower middle-income households are likely to experience financial problems With ...

The government’s budget estimates for 2022 now look way out of line The cost of living crisis afflicting households and businesses in Cyprus and most other countries is deepening as ...

The government and banks issue deceptive statements and statistics and the media blindly report them without question By Les Manison According to Reporters Without Borders, Cyprus ranks 69th on the “...

Accumulating huge amounts of idle cash By Les Manison In response to the financial crisis of 2012/13 the government in agreement with the troika of international institutional institutions took measures to ...

How politics has led to deterioration of the labour market since 2012 Has the Cyprus economy recovered from the financial crisis of 2012/2013 in that the majority of its citizens by 2021 were ...

The war between Russia and Ukraine and related sanctions has led to much higher energy, raw material and food prices that will seriously diminish the real purchasing power of households ...

By Les Manison Although the date of the presidential elections is still 12 months away there is already excessive attention being focused on the prospects of the many potential candidates. And ...

The effects of the Covid pandemic have exposed and exacerbated income inequalities in Cyprus including large remuneration disparities between employees in the higher-paid public sector and those in the private ...

Government inefficiency, corruption and bad policies based on ignoring the huge amount of debt will come back to bite us By Les Manison Research articles contend that the quality of ...

By Les Manison The autumn 2021 forecasts of the European Commission for Greece and Cyprus are excessively optimistic particularly on inflation rates and the government finances. In making these fanciful forecasts ...

The government budget for 2022 presented to the House of Representatives on October 7 calls for the overall deficit to be reduced substantially from an estimated 5 per cent of GDP in 2021 to 1.1 ...

By Les Manison Comparative data for 2021Q2 published by the ECB under its Single Supervisory Mechanism, reveal that the three largest Cypriot banks performed poorly relative to most of their ...

Prospects for growth in southern European countries are in jeopardy Following the global recession and the European sovereign debt crisis the ECB adopted a policy of monetary accommodation to raise ...

The European Commission, the International Monetary Fund National and the credit rating agency Moody’s have reported that the Cyprus Government has managed the Covid-19 crisis relatively well, with considerable ...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis central banks substantially lowered interest rates to support the recovery of their economies. In fact, the ECB by September 2015 had reduced its ...

Hourly pay for managers is over five times more than for elementary workers – the highest ratio in the EU. The much-heralded Cyprus Tomorrow plan must narrow that gap It is ...

Cyprus will not be able to take full advantage of ample EU covid aid unless it is willing to undertake major reforms In recent days there has been much advertising ...

Government’s draft recovery plan still relying too much on boosting tourism and property investments By Les Manison The recent release of national accounts, public finance and employment “estimates” for 2020 ...

In 2019, the average salary of a civil servant was €40,000, for a private sector employee it was €20,000 While the official estimate that real GDP contracted by just over 5 per cent in 2020 ...