Prime Minister Mitsotakis, a similar question for you. Give us a sense of what this stewardship offered Greece and the extent to which the road to recovery is down to that stewardship
First of all let me thank Secretary-General Gurria for his leadership, for his passion and for everything that he has contributed to the OECD. I had the chance to work with him very closely not just as a Prime Minister, but also as a Minister in charge of administrative reforms. One of the projects that we ran with the OECD was a systematic assessment of the administrative burdens that we needed to eliminate in order to make our economy more competitive and our public administration more effective. This is just one example of the work that we have done with the OECD over the past ten years. As you know, the last decade was not particularly successful for the country and we frequently relied on OECD stewardship on various projects where we felt that we could benefit from best practices, but also a fresh look regarding how we need to address major challenges that we are facing. Let me just highlight two additional examples of work that we’ve done with the OECD. The first had to do with opening up our products markets and how we are going to make them more competitive. And the second, which I think was of particular importance, had to do with promoting transparent and accountable government. We have actually set up a National Transparency Authority. Interestingly enough its first Director of the Agency is a Greek civil servant who has been trained at the OECD and has run various projects of a similar nature in many other countries. This is just one example of how we can actually use the OECD expertise within our own administrative priorities.
Prime Minister Mitsotakis, I hate this role of Devil’s advocate and playing the skeptic and the cynic. What do you feel the OECD could do better?
I would echo what the Prime Minister of Iceland said. “Building back better” means doing things differently. So, in the post-Covid era, maybe some of the preconceptions, some of the ideas that were sort of enshrined in the OECD’s way of doing business need to be reevaluated. But I would add two more thematic areas where I would like the OECD to do even more work. They have been extremely systematic but they are extremely important to us. The one is the nexus between education, skills and the digital economy and of course the second is how do we reduce inequalities. And what Covid has taught us about the dignity of work and about making sure some of the low-paying jobs in our economies are actually properly rewarded. We all understood their importance during the Covid epidemic.
Prime Minister Mitsotakis, “Building back better”, what is the most essential ingredient for you to receive from a steward like the OECD?
The OECD has been and continues to be a vast repository of data, of best practices. And as a government that is certainly looking towards implementing bold transformative moves rather than incremental changes, we are very much interested in the sort of best practices that we could use when we think about “Building Back Better”, about a completely different future, and a completely different growth path. I fully share what the Secretary-General said, we cannot longer rely as much on consumption and of course the twin priorities of a Green and a Digital transformation have been enshrined in the mandate that this government has received. We now have the additional benefit of having significant European funds through the Recovery and Resilience Fund to support these policies. The bolder the examples and the best practices that the OECD could share with us, the more interested we will be.
And Mr Prime Minister, give us your thoughts quickly on what we have just heard from Prime Minister Jakobsdóttir on gender and equality. I spoke to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and others about this as well this morning. How critical is it and what are we seeing in your country?
It is absolutely critical and frankly we haven’t made as much progress as I would like on this front. It is an ongoing struggle. We still have relatively low women participation in the labour force. It is an issue that we need to address. We do not have as much political representation as I would like. It is changing but it is changing in a slow manner. At least we have our first President of the Hellenic Republic who is female. I was very proud to propose her and she was elected by our Parliament. So, we should not forget that big social changes also need to go hand in hand with the big economic reforms that we envision. And certainly gender equality on all fronts, real gender equality, is absolutely critical. Sometimes it’s the small changes, for example what you do with preschool education, how do you allow women who would spend time taking care of young children actually go out to work, actually make the biggest difference when it comes to these sorts of policies.
