This Country Sees The Biggest Stock Market Growth In 2019

Greece is headed to set the largest stock market growth in the world for the financial year 2019, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

Largest Growth In Decades

The country, which is still reeling from the debt crisis spurred by the financial crisis of 2007-2008, has seen its Athens Stock Exchange Index grow by 45% thus far in 2019, according to Bloomberg data.

This is the Index’s largest annual growth in two decades since 1999, Bloomberg data shows.

Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of 2018 stood at 181.2% according to data from Eurostat. But market analysts are suggesting that the economy is recovering.

George Lagarias, Chief Economist at Mazars Financial Planning, told Bloomberg that the newly elected government’s tax cut measures and other pro-business policies helped the growth of the stock market.

Long Way To Go

The Greek government said in October that it would bring further tax cuts in 2020 to ensure that the economic growth increases from this year’s 2% to about 2.8%, according to Reuters.

In spite of the 45% growth, the Greek stock market has a long way to go, as Bloomberg notes. The total size of the Athens Index is $61 billion, not even a tenth of the world’s largest public traded company Apple Inc’s AAPL total market cap of $961.3 billion.