The Political Economy of the Greek Crisis by Zoltan Pogatsa

This book starts out by refuting widespread cultural stereotypes about Greeks with hard empirical data. It then offers a more refined and complex explanation for Greece’s troubled present by taking a scientific, international political economy based approach in a language that is accessible even to non economists. Hard data and graphs are used to illustrate arguments, as opposed to subjective opinions. The author takes readers through the post war decades of super high growth in Greece, the catastrophic entry into the European Communities, resulting in deindustrialisation, and the first sovereign debt crisis of the country at the beginning of the nineties. It explains the birth defects of the Eurozone construction which fuelled an artificial boom, and how a corrupt political class allowed special interests to capture the Greek state against the wishes of uninformed voters. It lays out how after 2009 the EU and the IMF attempted to cure Greece’s troubles by causing even more harm with austerity and a debt ‘haircut’, failing to address crucial issues such as offshore tax havens, untaxed shipping, excessive military spending, one sided economic structure and inadequate investment into human capital.