Trade with Greece
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new services and offer these services to entre-
preneurs and the economy at large.
●Ensuring that competent government services
take chamber opinions into account more
responsibly, thus helping avoid erroneous
choices that impose a great cost on both the
businesses and the economy.
If the governments of the past few years had
shown more confidence in the chambers’ pro-
posals, the current economic crisis could have
possibly been avoided.
Apart from the above, it is also considered advis-
able to expand the role of chambers, as part of
the efforts to downsize the state:
●Today, several state or quasi-state agencies are
operating, at a high fiscal cost, within the
sphere of private enterprise, offering services to
enterprises whose aim is to modernize them-
selves, improve their productivity and expand
their activities. The abolition of these agencies
and the transfer of their responsibilities to the
chambers –which are run by the enterprises
themselves– will reduce state expenditure,
upgrading, at the same time, the quality of the
said services.
●Moreover, the transfer of the responsibility for
organizing and managing at least certain of the
country’s development infrastructures (airports,
industrial zones, conference centres, exhibition
centres etc.) to the chambers would, undoubt-
edly, improve the quality of these infrastruc-
tures and reduce their operating costs. The
state has shown that it is incapable of efficient-
ly operating in this field, not only because it
lacks the requisite flexibility in crucial decision
making, but also because the services it ren-
ders do not, after all, sufficiently respond to the
enterprises’ needs.
Given that the presence of the state in economic
activity tends to be minimized, the chambers, also
owing to their legal status, emerge as the ideal
alternative to full privatization, which also has
many side-effects, and to full state control, which
has already been disproved by the global eco-
nomic reality.
In order to turn genuine entrepreneurship
–which takes risks, innovates, generates wealth
and creates stable jobs– into a growth driver and
dynamically protect it from unsubstantiated
defamatory references, which aim at downgrad-
ing and undermining its productive work in a
country were statism is deeply rooted, we need
strong and dynamic chambers.
After all, the fast return of the Greek economy to a
sustainable growth course, through the mobiliza-
tion of all sound entrepreneurial forces, would be
significantly facilitated if the country’s chambers
evolved into the main advisor of the central, as well
as local, government on growth policy issues; into
the officially recognized intermediary between the
business world and the authorities, both on the
national, and the regional and international levels;
as well as into the quintessential national agency
for the provision of services aimed at improving
business operation.
