Grčka - enormni dug, protesti oko mera štednje

[namenski]

;)

 

 

 

Edited August 1, 2015 by namenski

[FERNOUX H]

Ajde sada da se vratimo ozbiljnoj diskusiji, a antipoliticari lepo na PZD

[Anonymous]

[namenski]

Ajde sada da se vratimo ozbiljnoj diskusiji, a antipoliticari lepo na PZD

Da se vratite, nego sta.

Al' da bude veleumno, onako bas analiticarski.

I obavezno da bude sto vise stranih reci, znas ono dupli nipli, radapciger...

I skracenice, i skracenice.

Obavezno.

[Haralampije]

reportovan si zbog teranja sa topika

[vememah]

 Još jedan nobelovac u debati:

 

AUG 6, 2015 21

What Greece Needs to Prosper

 

Edmund S. Phelps

NEW YORK – Some economists overlook the modern idea that a country’s prosperity depends on innovation and entrepreneurship. They take the mechanistic view that prosperity is a matter of employment, and that employment is determined by “demand” – government spending, household consumption, and investment demand.

Looking at Greece, these economists argue that a shift in fiscal policy to “austerity” – a smaller public sector – has brought an acute deficiency of demand and thus a depression. But this claim misreads history and exaggerates the power of government spending.

Much of the decline in employment in Greece occurred prior to the sharp cuts in spending between 2012 and 2014 – owing, no doubt, to sinking confidence in the government. Greek government spending per quarter climbed to a plateau of around €13.5 billion ($14.8 billion) in 2009-2012, before falling to roughly €9.6 billion in 2014-2015. Yet the number of job holders reached its high of 4.5 million in 2006-2009, and had fallen to 3.6 million by 2012. By the time Greece began to cut its budget, the rate of unemployment – 9.6% of the labor force in 2009 – had already risen almost to its recent level of 25.5%.

These findings weigh heavily against the hypothesis that “austerity” has brought Greece to its present plight. They indicate that Greece’s turn away from the high spending of 2008-2013 is not to blame for today’s mass unemployment.

Another finding casts doubt on whether austerity actually was imposed on Greece. Government spending has certainly fallen – but only to where it used to be: €9.6 billion in the first quarter of this year is, in fact, higher than it was as recently as 2003. So the premise of austerity appears to be wrong. Greece has not departed from past fiscal norms; it has returned to them. Rather than describing current government spending as “austere,” it would be more correct to view it as an end to years of fiscal profligacy, culminating in 2013, when the government’s budget deficit reached 12.3% of GDP and public debt climbed to 175% of GDP.

The “demand school” might respond that, regardless of whether there is fiscal austerity now, increased government spending (financed, of course, by debt) would impart a permanent boost to employment. But Greece’s recent experience suggests otherwise. The huge rise in government spending from 2006 to the 2009-2013 period did produce employment gains, but they were not sustained.

The real sticking point is that the government would have to issue bonds to finance its extra spending. Assuming a limit to foreign investors’ willingness to buy these bonds, Greeks would have to buy them. In an economy unequipped for growth, household wealth relative to wages would soar, and the labor supply would shrink, causing employment to contract.

So spending more is not the remedy for Greece’s plight, just as spending less was not the cause. What is the remedy, then? No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will suffice to achieve prosperity (in the form of low unemployment and high job satisfaction). Such measures would only help Greece to revive government spending. Then the economy’s stultifying corporatism – clientelism and cronyism in the public sector and vested interests and entrenched elites in the private sector – would gain a new lease on life. The European left may advocate that, but it would hardly be in Europe’s interest.

The remedy must lie in adopting the right structural reforms. Whether or not the reforms sought by the eurozone members raise the chances that their loans will be repaid, these creditors have a political and economic interest in the monetary union’s survival and development. They should also be ready to help Greece with the costs of making the necessary changes.

But it is Greece itself that must take charge of its reforms. And there are encouraging signs that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is willing to take up that cause. But he will need a sense of the required reforms. Greece must dismantle corporatist arrangements and practices that obstruct whatever innovation and entrepreneurship might emerge. Nurturing an abundance of imaginative innovators and vibrant entrepreneurs requires embracing a vision of venturesome lives of creativity and discovery.

 

Edmund S. Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, is Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University and author of Mass Flourishing.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/what-greece-needs-to-prosper-by-edmund-s--phelps-2015-08

Edited August 9, 2015 by vememah

[vememah]

Direktor UNHCR-a za Evropu prozvao Grčku zbog nesposobnosti da ponudi minimalno prihvatljive uslove za migrante.

 

'Shameful' Conditions For Migrants In Greece

Friday 07 August 2015

Thousands of migrants arrive in Greece to "shameful" conditions in a crisis that is affecting the rest of Europe, says the UN.

A UN refugee spokesman has criticised the conditions migrants are experiencing when they arrive on Greek islands.

Around 124,000 migrants - most fleeing war in Syria and Afghanistan - have arrived on Greece's coastline since the beginning of the year, a 750% increase compared to the same period last year.

More than 50,000 people arrived in July alone but only a fraction of these remain in the country to claim asylum there.

But the head of the UN refugee agency's Europe division says they find themselves having to sleep outside and rely on volunteers for food and water.

Vincent Cochetel said that, while Greece is struggling to support its own people during its economic crisis, the country's officials still needed to sort out their response to the growing number of refugees.

The UNHCR director for Europe said: "We are concerned with the situation where no one is really assuming leadership in the response, which makes it very difficult for humanitarian operators to participate in the efforts."

"In terms of water, in terms of sanitation, in terms of food assistance, it's totally inadequate. On most of the islands, there is no reception capacity, people are not sleeping under any form of roof.

"So it's total chaos on the islands.

"The level of suffering we have seen on the islands is unbearable."

He demanded urgent action from Athens, saying: "I've been working 30 years with UNHCR (and) I have never seen a situation like that...This is the European Union, and this is totally shameful."

On his twitter feed, he posted photos taken during his visit to Chios, Kos and Lesbos, describing reception facilities on Kos as "appalling" and those on Lesbos as "unacceptable", adding: "More needs to be done by Greece and the EU".

He told the media that "the top priority is not to let another Calais develop in other places of Europe", adding: "We believe that Europe needs to react and will react, because this is affecting so many European countries."

The Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras responded to the words by pleading with Europe for help, saying his country could not deal with the thousands of people while its own citizens are struggling with austerity measures.

Mr Tsipras said the boatloads arriving daily had triggered a "humanitarian crisis within the economic crisis" and that it was "beyond what our state infrastructure can handle".

He added: "The EU being tested on the issue of Greece. It has responded negatively on the economic front - that's my view. I hope it will respond positively on the humanitarian front."

http://news.sky.com/story/1532133/shameful-conditions-for-migrants-in-greece

 

vincent cochetel ‏@cochetel Jul 29

#asylum seekers, appalling reception conditions. Somewhere in Africa? No, In Kos, Greece, European Union...

 

 

Edited August 9, 2015 by vememah

[vememah]

Libertarijanci nude zanimljivu novu metriku za procenu zdravlja ekonomija.
 

Mises Daily

In Greece, Reliance on Public Funds Is the Central Problem

Justin Murray

Greece is a hot topic at the moment, mostly with the continued negotiations over bailouts from the European Union and, through institutions like the IMF, the world at large. Much of the discussion paints the image that Greece is only a debt-restructuring away from a stable economic situation. However, without understanding how Greece got into this problem in the first place and identifying the root cause of an over-indebted society, any plan or solution has a high probability of failure. To crack into this root cause, I had to develop an entirely new metric called “implied public reliance.”

Employment Data Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

The main puzzle behind Greece is simple from a praxeological standpoint — you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. Greece, being a nation with a high tax rate on production and a high subsidy rate on public assistance, will generate a population that finds greater preference toward public assistance and away from productive labor.

The problem with this is that the data doesn’t, on the surface, support the statement. Calculating the average annual hours worked, Greece actually ranks far ahead of nations with lower public sector subsidies and lower taxes:



If it were true that higher taxes dissuaded labor, then Greece shouldn’t report higher worker hours than much lower tax burden nations like the United States and Canada. This indicator would also identify Germany as the European Union’s economic basket case, not its economic powerhouse. Even nations like Spain and Portugal, which have a negative stereotype for sloth, both come ahead of Germany, but are suffering economically.
The problem is these numbers only applied to those who were actively employed and did not provide us a picture of the overall employment situation. Even other indicators, like workforce participation rates, don’t fully paint the picture. What is needed is a new metric that effectively identifies the core of a nation’s potential growth and prosperity.

Someone Has to Pay for All the “Free” Stuff

This is where a look at “implied public reliance” comes in. Ultimately, in a modern nation, all citizenry is provided with the necessities of life in some form or another. Mass starvation, homelessness and sickness is not generally present in modern nations, so virtually every citizen receives food, medicine, and housing from somewhere.

So, we must look to find the source of those resources, and it is, by and large, the active employees of any given nation that are tapped to provide the resources for all other individuals not engaged in overt economically productive activities. In every modern country, these resources are primarily delivered through the public bureaucracy and funded with taxation on existing workers.

How to Find Who’s Paying

First, we must identify a nation’s currently employed population. Next, all public sector employees are removed to obtain an adjusted productive workforce. It may be objectionable that certain professions, like teaching, nurses in single payer systems and fire fighters, are classified as an unproductive workforce, but as our system is currently designed, the salaries of these individuals are not covered by the immediate beneficiaries like any other business but are paid through dispersed taxation methods.

Finally, this productive population is divided into the nation’s total population to identify the total number of individuals a worker is expected to support in his country. To remove bias toward non-working spouses and children, the average household size is subtracted from this result to get the final number of individuals that an individual must support that are not part of their own voluntary household. In other words, how many total strangers is this individual providing for?

The Implied Public Reliance metric does a far better job of predicting economic performance:



Greece, the nation with the debt problem, is currently expecting each employed person to support 6.1 other people above and beyond their own families. This explains much of the pressure to work long hours and also explains the unstable debt loads. Since a single Greek worker can’t possibly hope to support what amounts to a complete baseball team on a single salary, the difference is covered by Greek public debt, debt that the underlying social system cannot hope to repay as the incentives are to maintain the current system of subsidies. To demonstrate how difficult it is to change these systems within a democratic society, we just have to look at the percentage of the population that is reliant on public subsidy.



The numbers imply that 67 percent of the population of Greece is wholly reliant on the Greek government to provide their incomes. With such a commanding supermajority, changing this system with the democratic process is impossible as the 67 percent have strong incentives to continue to vote for the other 33 percent — and also foreign entities — to cover their living expenses.

How does this equate to GDP growth? While GDP is not a perfect metric, it is still the best available to identify economic health. Each nation that has breached the 50 percent barrier in public reliance is also showing poor growth with numerous nations coming dangerously close to the majority in some form of reliance on redistribution for earnings.

 

What does this tell us? A nation that allows its citizenry to remain idle and expect the support of a productive worker will eventually undermine its ability to maintain the economy that those recipients of public funds rely on. Nations that do not have a structure to dissuade usage of public assistance or hire too many public sector workers will find their economic growth impeded and, if it becomes too large, recessive.

 

However, public institutions are not capable of creating these safeguards to ensure as few people as possible engage in safety net programs. Government institutions are, in fact, designed to grow public sector employment rolls. So as long as this social structure is in place, the odds that a Greek default and restructuring will lead to a sustained Greek recovery are very low.
 
https://mises.org/library/greece-reliance-public-funds-central-problem

[Budja]

Hm, ova "public reliance" mera mora da je pozitivno korelisana sa ucescem javng sektora u zaposlenosti, a pre par strana je neko postavio grafikon gde Grcka i ne izgleda tako lose po tom pitanju.

[vememah]

Svakako bi članak bio dosta ubedljiviji da je naveo izvore podataka i način izračunavanja (uopšte nije nemoguće je da je radnike u firmama u vlasništvu države računao kao izdržavana lica, pa tako dobio da je Grčka najgora).

[Gandalf]

go qrac.  

 

Edited August 10, 2015 by Gandalf

[Budja]

Slozio bih se. Koliko imam utisak, cesto u tim think-tankovima izmisljaju indekse, masiraju podatke i maskiraju korelaciju za uzrocnost.

 

Prosle godine bio na nekoj promociji Heritage-ovo Index of Economic Freedom. Koje je to govno, boze sacuvaj. Nisa siguran da su oni o kompetitivnosti i slicni, kao i medijski nesto bolji.

[đorđe geprat]

jutros gledam na TV pa rekoše da je to bitna vest i u štampi. da je nemačka zaradila 100 milijardi € tokom grčke finansijske krize. posle je žena na N1 objasnila da je to virtuelno, posledica veće potražnje a samim tim i manje kamatne stope na nemačke državne obveznice. 

 

koje loženje.

[Singer]

to ko onomad mi kad smo uštedeli 400 miliona

[Prospero]

Timeo professōrum et dona ferentes
 
 
 

Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs (left to right) | Getty

 
LETTER FROM GREECE
 

Beware of American econ professors!
How Krugman, Sachs and Stiglitz led the Greeks astray.

By YANNIS PALAIOLOGOS
 8/11/15, 5:30 AM CET
 

ATHENS — Since Alexis Tsipras made the difficult but responsible choice of arriving at a compromise with Greece’s creditors in mid-July, preventing an outcome that would have led his country out of the euro, a number of revelations have highlighted the radical nature of the proponents of rupture in his inner circle.

In countless public utterances and interviews since his resignation, former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has spoken of how he urged the prime minister to authorize the issue of a parallel currency, to declare that Athens would default on €3.5 billion in Greek government bonds owed to the ECB on July 20 and to seize control of the Bank of Greece. Such an aggressive move would have led inevitably to the introduction of a new currency.
 
Recently, the newspaper I work for, Kathimerini, revealed excerpts of a conference call in which Varoufakis participated on July 16. In the call, the former minister tells an assortment of hedge-fund executives and other investors of plans he had to hack into the database of the general secretariat of public revenue at the ministry.

The idea was to use the personal data of Greek taxpayers to secretly create parallel accounts that would facilitate payments in case of a major liquidity squeeze. These accounts would be denominated in euros, but if the need presented itself, they could be turned into the new drachma “at the drop of a hat.”
Varoufakis is not the only one to have harbored revolutionary plans.

On July 14, a few days before he was dismissed from the cabinet for voting against measures mandated by the agreement reached between Tsipras and Greece’s creditors, Panayotis Lafazanis, the head of the Left Platform, the influential far-left faction within Syriza, suggested seizing the national mint and expropriating up to €22 billion in reserves (his figure).

The money would have been used to pay for pensions, public sector salaries and imports while Greece prepared for a return to the drachma. Small details, like the fact that the cash reserves would have immediately been declared counterfeit, infecting all euro transactions in Greece and causing complete chaos, were ignored in the fervor of Lafazanis’s version of the attack on the Winter Palace.
And then of course, there is the story published by the newspaper To Vima about Tsipras’s own efforts to secure a loan of $10 billion from Vladimir Putin, which would be used as foreign currency reserves to support a new drachma (the Kremlin has denied the account).

‘Reckless gamble’

None of this appears to have given pause to Greece’s (and in particular Varoufakis’s) international cheerleaders. I am referring in particular here to high profile U.S. economists, like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, who have led the global anti-austerity campaign and have made my country a cause célèbre in that struggle. They have been right to argue that too much austerity has been imposed on Greece, and that further debt relief is required. But in recent months, as relations between Athens and its creditors have deteriorated, they have served Greece’s cause very poorly indeed.
  
They have wrongly insisted that the fault for the breakdown in trust between the two sides lies exclusively with the creditors. They have also — some as informal but active advisors to Varoufakis — insisted on the need for deep debt relief, in a form bound to antagonize Greece’s European partners and one that isn’t economically necessary for Greek recovery.

 

As close friend to the former Greek finance minister, U.S.
economist James Galbraith counseled Varoufakis (pictured)
| EPA

In a New Yorker profile a couple of weeks ago, Varoufakis says that Sachs, one of these informal advisors, counseled him repeatedly in the run-up to the referendum to default on the creditors if Greek demands for debt relief were not met.

Krugman, in a visit to Athens in April, said that structural reform did not really matter much for future growth. After the referendum was called, he urged Greeks to vote No, arguing that, especially after the imposition of capital controls, things couldn’t get much worse, and would probably get better, with a new currency Stiglitz also nudged Greeks in the direction of No, and Grexit.

 

James K. Galbraith, a close friend of Varoufakis, co-ordinated a secret working group within the Greek finance ministry about the logistics of Grexit, on the understanding that it constituted contingency planning against aggressive moves by the creditors. Clearly, some in government, including his friend (certainly by the end of June, if not earlier), saw the work quite differently.

 

World-famous economists — men of Nobel prizes and stellar academic accomplishment — have provided intellectual cover to radicals who appeared at best to be willing to take a stupendously reckless gamble with Greece’s financial, political and geopolitical future, and at worst to be planning the realization of their lifelong dream of a socialist takeover of power.

 

As Tsipras moves grudgingly to the center and purges his government and his party (if he manages it) of people like Varoufakis and Lafazanis, it is high time for their cheerleaders to look beyond ex cathedra macroeconomics.

They should have the honesty to admit that in the hands of such men, an exit from the euro, which Greeks never voted for anyway, either in January or in July, would have been an unmitigated catastrophe, dwarfing the costs even of the bad deal struck on July 13. And they should know by now that the best hope of building the institutions capable of supporting long-term growth in Greece lies within the eurozone, not in the desperate disorder that would sweep the country outside it.
 

Yannis Palaiologos is a features reporter for Kathimerini newspaper and the author of “The Thirteenth Labour of Hercules” (Portobello Books, 2014).