Greece: Getting Out of the Recession

Dimitri Papadimitriou, Michalis Nikiforos and Gennaro Zezza

Economics Strategic Analysis Archive from Levy Economics Institute

Abstract: The Greek government has agreed to a new round of fiscal austerity measures consisting of a sharp increase in taxes on income and property and further reductions in pension and other welfare-related expenditures. Based on our model of the Greek economy, policies aimed at reducing the government deficit will cause a recession, unless other components of aggregate demand increase enough to more than offset the negative impact of fiscal austerity on output and employment. In this report we argue that the troika strategy of increasing net exports to restart the economy has failed, partly because of the low impact of falling wages on prices, partly because of the low trade elasticities with respect to prices, and partly because of other events that caused a sharp reduction in transport services, which used to be Greece’s largest export sector. A policy initiative to boost aggregate demand is urgently needed, now more than ever. We propose a fiscal policy alternative based on innovative financing mechanisms, which could trigger a boost in confidence that would encourage renewed private investment.

Date: 2016-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-mac and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/sa_gr_9_16.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lev:levysa:sa_gr_9_16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Strategic Analysis Archive from Levy Economics Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elizabeth Dunn ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).