Excommunications, nullifications and the big picture of the Cypriot economy in 2024

Successive upgrades by international rating agencies and Cyprus' return to investment grade after 13 years, a series of large foreign direct investments on the island that demonstrate the restoration of foreign investors' confidence in the country, a financial sector - as the most basic pillar of our economy - that is firmly on its feet and inspires confidence and security for the present and the future.

This is how one could describe, in headlines, the image that was formed during and which is being left behind by 2024 regarding the financial environment in the country, an economy with performances that, as the president of the CCCI, Stavros Stavrou, rightly described a few days ago, had been "unimaginable."

Is everything rosy and are there no problems in the real economy? Of course not. However, the big picture undoubtedly reflects a country and an economy that are on the right track, a country and an economy whose situation in no way reflects the easy and demagogic approach of everything being "black and white" that some want to project.

2024 was a year when the Cypriot economy demonstrably made its own impressive restart, when the goal of development was not reflected in the realm of theory as a wish list, but as a reality set out with tangible examples and numbers.

The wish and expectation, of course, is that in 2025 this course will continue, that there will be no setbacks, that the path of development will become a one-way street, a road of no return.

Without dangerous extreme enthusiasm that may bring about the opposite results, but with prudence, without underestimating any - and there are many - external risks that lurk, as well as of course far from the well-known aphorisms and nihilisms that many like to indulge in, the new year can constitute another historical milestone for Cyprus, a year in which the country's economy can record even better and more "unimaginable" performances.

This is at least what the best prospects with which it undoubtedly enters 2025 advocate, this is what every sane citizen, every resident of this island who does not simply like to complain, who has not reduced darkness and misery to a way of life and existence, certainly wants to see come to pass.

*George Ploutarchou, Editor-in-Chief, InBusinessNews