The Greek Economic Crisis and the Experience of Austerity: A Strategic Analysis

Dimitri Papadimitriou, Michalis Nikiforos and Gennaro Zezza

Economics Strategic Analysis Archive from Levy Economics Institute

Abstract: Employment in Greece is in free fall, with more than one million jobs lost since October 2008--a drop of more than 28 percent. In March, the "official" unemployment rate was 27.4 percent, the highest level seen in any industrialized country in the free world during the last 30 years. In this report, Levy Institute President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Research Scholars Michalis Nikiforos and Gennaro Zezza analyze the economic crisis in Greece and offer policy recommendations to restore growth and increase employment. This analysis relies on the Levy Institute's macroeconomic model of the Greek economy (LIMG), a stock-flow consistent model similar to the Institute’s model of the US economy. Based on the LIMG simulations, the authors find that a continuation of austerity policies would decrease GDP and increase unemployment. They find recent International Monetary Fund and European Commission projections for the Greek economy overly optimistic, and recommend a recovery strategy, similar to the Marshall Plan, to increase public consumption and investment—a strategy centered on an expanded direct public-service job creation program.

Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/sa_gr_7_13.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_jul_13

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 ).