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Trade with Greece
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serious review of past policies is needed in order
to formulate new policies and select new devel-
opment priorities, along with an in-depth under-
standing of the factors that led to –instead of the
resources that were spent in– today's divestment
and loss of productive capacity, competitiveness,
quality and jobs. The systematic refusal to design
sector- and region-level policies, the failure to
comprehend the crucial importance of business
clusters, the lack of confidence to support struc-
tures for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises,
which could be instruments for transferring new
knowledge about technology, organization, mar-
kets and human resources, are problems that
have been identified, in the sense that they need
to be addressed by economic policy in order to
reverse the decline of the Greek economy's pro-
ductive and technological base. This orientation
towards growth will transform a productive sys-
tem that consists of developmental “monocul-
tures” (tourism-agriculture) and will act as
Greece's new, top-quality growth engine, through
targeted policies that adopt clear goals (quality
and structural competitiveness) and timetables,
coordination, synergies, complementarity, inter-
nationalization of operational programs and poli-
cies, as well as by establishing the evaluation of
results against targets.
sure of businesses, the increase of lay-offs and
unemployment, the reduction of private consump-
tion and aggregate demand; based on the above,
the main challenge is to radically re-orientate eco-
nomic and social policy, not, of course, in terms of
rhetoric, but in terms of substance and long- to
medium-term prospective, in order to establish
the conditions required for dealing with the afore-
mentioned serious economic and social problems
faced by Greece during this decade. In this con-
text, the GSEE believes that the prerequisite for
the necessary radical re-orientation towards
recovery and dealing with the lending, debt and
unemployment crisis, is the replacement of the
European and Greek, mainly monetarist, growth
model that calls for flexibility and labour deregula-
tion (micro level), enhancing the supply-side
(macro level) and the privatization and capitaliza-
tion of the welfare state (social level), by a new
growth model aimed at labour regulation (micro
level), demand enhancement, as well as innova-
tion and productive development through the sup-
port of public (networks, development, social
infrastructure) and private (agriculture, manufac-
turing, green economy) investment (macro level)
and enhanced income redistribution (social level).
Profits should be the backdrop, and not the foun-
dation of our entrepreneurial culture. Moreover, a
photo: Costas Lakafossis