Civil servants staged a 24-hour strike Thursday against austerity measures and expected job cuts by Greece's crisis-plagued government, and the EU's statistics agency said the country's budget was even worse than previously thought. The strike disrupted public services, shut down schools and left state hospitals working with emergency staff. Protesters from a Communist-backed trade union blockaded Athens' main port of Piraeus, disrupting ferry services. Eurostat, meanwhile raised Greece's budget deficit in 2009 to 13.6 percent of gross domestic product from its earlier prediction of 12.9 percent, while the ratio of government debt to GDP stood at 115.1 percent, the second highest in the European Union after Italy. In comments that are sure to rattle markets, the statistics agency also expressed “a reservation on the quality of the data reported by Greece.” It also said Greek's 2009 figures could be revised further, to the tune of 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points of GDP for the deficit and 5 to 7 percentage points of GDP for the debt. Markets were shocked last fall when the government announced that the previous conservative Greek government had issued misleading financial data for years. About 3,000-4,000 protesters marched through central Athens, carrying banners reading “tax the rich” and “Don't take the bread from our table.”
