Greece

Greece: High Debt Load, Elevated Defense Spending, Stale Production Data

Greece's economy totaled $256.24 billion in 2024, per the World Bank's WDI figures, with GDP per capita of $24,626 and a population of 10.41 million the same year. Government debt is projected at 136.9 percent of GDP in 2026, per the IMF's World Economic Outlook — the highest debt ratio in this briefing series, more than double the size of the country's own annual economic output. Reserves stood at just $7.94 billion in 2025, per the IMF's International Financial Statistics, a small cushion set against that debt load and the smallest reserves figure among the European states in this series.

Military Capacity

Military spending reached $8.39 billion in 2025, equal to 2.989 percent of GDP, per SIPRI's 2025 figures — a high ratio among the European states in this series. SIPRI calculates that ratio against its own GDP series, not the World Bank's $256.24 billion figure cited above, and the two should not be combined. Active personnel totaled 132,000 in 2022, per the Correlates of War National Material Capabilities (COW NMC) dataset, which also puts Greece's composite index of national capability (CINC) at 0.0026 for that year — a personnel count larger than that of some countries in this series with considerably bigger economies.

Governance

V-Dem's 2025 figures (v15) score Greece's electoral democracy at 0.741 and liberal democracy at 0.568, with state capacity at 0.808 — solid but not top-tier scores among the European states reviewed in this series. The gap of roughly 0.17 between the electoral and liberal democracy scores points to a wider divergence between electoral mechanics and liberal constraints than is seen in some of the higher-scoring European states in this set.

Energy

Greece's primary energy consumption was 1.16 exajoules in 2024, and it generated 58.27 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, per Our World in Data. The oil and gas production figures available are stale: oil production of 2.018 TWh and gas production of 0.137 TWh are both dated 2016, nearly a decade old, and say nothing about current output. Both figures are also small relative to the country's 58.27 TWh of electricity generation, suggesting Greece draws on other sources for the bulk of its power even on this outdated production data. No more recent production figures were supplied.

Sources: World Bank WDI; IMF WEO; IMF IFS; SIPRI Milex; COW NMC; V-Dem v15; Our World in Data (Energy)