This book offers a comprehensive guide to the on-going Greek debt crisis. It identifies and explains Greece's idiosyncratic weaknesses, and highlights the existing rigidities in the EU architecture that make the recovery prospects of the Greek economy challenging. Chapters from expert contributors highlight aspects of the performance of the Greek economy with focus on export performance, labour market conditions, political cycles and regional income disparities. The book then goes on to outline the banking system in Greece in the post-crisis era, and includes analysis that explains how the credit rating score affected Greece's borrowing capacity prior to the start of the insolvency crisis. The final part analyses and compares alternative scenarios of fiscal consolidation, seeking to identify whether there are alternatives to fiscal austerity and the impact of each one of them. This section also clarifies various misconceptions about the significant determinants of international competitiveness. Despite the focus of the book, the lessons drawn from the chapters are not limited to Greece. This volume will be of interest to academics, practitioners and policy makers who wish to take a closer look at the Greek debt crisis and learn more about the challenges the Greek economy is currently facing.

This book offers a comprehensive guide to the on-going Greek debt crisis. It identifies and explains Greece's idiosyncratic weaknesses, and highlights the existing rigidities in the EU architecture that make the recovery prospects of the Greek economy challenging. Chapters from expert contributors highlight aspects of the performance of the Greek economy with focus on export performance, labour market conditions, political cycles and regional income disparities. The book then goes on to outline the banking system in Greece in the post-crisis era, and includes analysis that explains how the credit rating score affected Greece's borrowing capacity prior to the start of the insolvency crisis. The final part analyses and compares alternative scenarios of fiscal consolidation, seeking to identify whether there are alternatives to fiscal austerity and the impact of each one of them. This section also clarifies various misconceptions about the significant determinants of international competitiveness. Despite the focus of the book, the lessons drawn from the chapters are not limited to Greece. This volume will be of interest to academics, practitioners and policy makers who wish to take a closer look at the Greek debt crisis and learn more about the challenges the Greek economy is currently facing.

The current monograph is a collection of essays on the productivity-trade nexus. In a world, where many trade impediments have been removed a country's ability to succeed in international markets is associated with its ability to improve cost competitiveness. A main objective of the book is to check the empirical validity of the neoclassical theories of trade and specialization. Why countries produce what they produce? Ioannis attempts to provide an assessment to these questions paying special attention to nation-wide factor endowments and productivity performance. Throughout the whole book productivity is a key measure, but after all is productivity just "manna from heaven" or is it something that countries can stimulate with the passage of time? Chapter four analyzes the sources of productivity growth recognizing among others that for a technologically laggard country, imitation of technological advancements, already implemented somewhere else, are rather important engines. Although, the present book emphasizes to Greece, the reader can obtain lessons with respect to many other countries, especially those that comprise of the so- called periphery of Europe.