Greece Continues to Struggle Economically

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
Poor Greece! Caught, in the words of London-based writer and translator Noonie Minogue, “in a steely grip between Brussels in the north and refugees to the south,” it remains Europe’s economic and political problem child.

The country has never recovered from the 2008 Great Recession. Things have been so bad these past few years that even poets are weighing on its financial crisis.

Penguin recently published Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, an anthology of works edited by Karen Van Dyck, a professor of Modern Greek Literature at New York’s Columbia University, dealing with the catastrophic situation.

By 2013, more than a third of Greeks were living below the poverty line. By 2014, government wages and pensions had been cut 12 times in four years.

The economy has shrunk by a quarter in the last five years. More than 27 per cent of Greeks are unemployed. About 55 per cent of young people, particularly those in the areas of technology and education, have left Greece to find work elsewhere.

At least 40 per cent of children were living in poverty in 2014, and the number is now approaching 50 per cent. Public debt is the highest in Europe, over 180 per cent of GDP.

Greece is now at the mercy of its creditors. In June, the Board of Directors of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the bailout fund for the 19 members of the European Union that use the euro as their common currency, authorized handing 7.5 billion euros, or $8.4 billion, in bailout aid to Greece, allowing the country to keep paying its bills in the coming months.

Greece also won additional pledges of debt relief from the Eurozone finance ministers, helping to ease concerns about another crisis.

In July of 2015, the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was forced to accept austerity measures in order to receive a bailout. Germany had threatened to oust Greece from the European Union and the euro if it didn’t deliver on austerity measures.

The Eurozone finance ministers, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund had demanded deep budget cuts and steep tax increases. They required Greece to overhaul its economy by streamlining the government, ending tax evasion and making Greece an easier place to do business.

The recent aid has involved yet further painful reforms and austerity measures, including higher taxes on coffee, alcohol, fuel and other goods.

There is also a measure creating a privatization fund to sell off state assets and utilities, including public transport companies, the post office and the state power corporation.

As former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis wrote in a New York Times commentary in May, “Greece’s hospitals are running out of basic necessities, while our universities cannot even afford to provide toilet paper in their restrooms. In Athens these days, only the soup kitchens are flourishing.”

Varoufakis, who has now also published And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, a book on the crisis, was removed as finance minister by Tsipras last year for refusing to yield to the bailout demands.

Greece’s economy this year is set to shrink by a further 0.3 percent. Still, people have not lost hope. “In all of the misery and mess, new poetry is everywhere, too large and too various a body of writing to fit neatly on either side of any ideological rift,” concludes Van Dyck.