Social policy in hard times: The case of Greece

Abstract

The current Greek crisis started off in 2009 as a fiscal crisis, soon turned into a sovereign debt crisis, then mutated into a full-blown recession, unprecedented in depth and duration. The article offers an early analysis of the impact of the crisis on the labour market and the distribution of incomes, showing that the need for social protection is now much greater than ever before. It then critically reviews social policy responses in a context of both cuts to social spending and reforms in social programmes, arguing that the Greek welfare state is poorly equipped to meet the challenge. The article concludes by discussing prospects for social policy in an era of permanent austerity.

Keywords

austerity crisis Greece safety net

Greece in crisis

The current Greek crisis, the deepest and longest in living memory, started inconspicuously. Soon after the general election of October 2009 the incoming socialist government announced that earlier fiscal statistics had been misreported by the previous conservative government. The extent of the correction was enormous. Budget deficit figures for 2009 were revised from 3.7% to 12.5%, and later to 15.8% of gross domestic product (GDP). The corresponding public debt estimate was also raised from 99.6% to 115.1%, and eventually to 126.8% of GDP (Bank of Greece, 2011).

Coming just as the European economy smarted from the impact of the 2007–09 international financial crisis, the news revived speculation about the future of the euro, and shattered the credibility of Greece’s claim to remain part of it. Immediately the cost of borrowing began to climb to prohibitive levels. After a considerable amount of vacillation on both sides, in May 2010 the Greek government negotiated an unprecedented €110 billion loan with the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In return for the loan, the government signed up to a three-year Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, committing Greece to sweeping spending cuts, steep tax increases, and an ambitious programme of structural reforms (EC, 2010; IMF, 2010).

The purpose of the loan had been to cover Greece’s entire borrowing requirements, on more favourable terms than could be secured from the markets, for a period of three years. The ‘troika’ of donors assumed that the breathing space would enable the country to sort itself out (i.e. drastically reduce deficits) and return to the markets shortly thereafter (IMF, 2010). However, it gradually became clear that more aid was needed. After the Greek Parliament narrowly approved in June 2011 a Mid-term Fiscal Strategy Framework (2012–2015), virtually dictated by the EU-ECB-IMF ‘troika’ of donors, the euro area summit of 21 July 2011 improved the terms of the Greek programme by conceding lower interest rates and a longer repayment period (CEU, 2011a).

The deal proved ineffective against the markets’ bet that the country could not realistically service its foreign debt, and would therefore be forced to default. Amidst fears of ‘contagion’ (i.e. that the crisis might spread beyond the original ‘PIGS’ of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain to the rest of the eurozone), the European summit of 26 October 2011 formally accepted the principle of a ‘haircut’ (a negotiated reduction in the nominal value of Greek government bonds). European leaders announced that a new loan from the EU and the IMF of up to €100 billion until 2014 would be made available to Greece. Another €30 billion of new loan was provided to sweeten the deal to write off 50% of that part of Greek debt held by commercial banks and other private creditors (approximately €200 billion). Multilateral loans and Greek debt held by the ECB were not included. The ‘haircut’ and the new loan, ‘accompanied by a strengthening of the mechanisms for the monitoring of implementation of the reforms’, were hoped to help Greece reduce its public debt to 120% of GDP by 2020 (CEU, 2011b: 1).

Nevertheless, political instability at home persisted. The ‘troika’ informed the government that the sixth tranche of the Greek loan (needed to pay next month’s salaries and pensions) would not be made available unless the main political parties reached consensus for fiscal consolidation and structural reforms. After a few days of political paralysis, a coalition government was formed on 11 November 2011, with a former Vice-President of the ECB and ex-Governor of the Bank of Greece as the new Prime Minister, and a mandate to secure the sixth tranche and lead the country to a general election in February 2012. A small number of cabinet posts were reserved for the conservative opposition and a smaller far Right party. The three Left parties did not join the coalition and returned a no-confidence vote against the government in Parliament.

At the time of writing (January 2012), the Greek economy had already been in recession for three consecutive years, and showed few signs of recovery. The latest official figures (Bank of Greece, 2011) estimated the size of (negative) growth in 2011 at -5.5%, and bleakly forecast a further -2.8% in 2012, before an anticipated anaemic recovery of +1.0% in 2013. On those figures, GDP will have contracted in 2012 by as much as 14.4% in real terms relative to 2007. So severe and drawn out a crisis had simply no precedence in Greece’s economic history at least since the late 1940s. Note also that economic forecasts over the last few months had all turned out to be optimistic. Needless to add, prospects for recovery at home were negatively affected by the wider uncertainty abroad, concerning the survival of the European common currency (IMF, 2011; OECD, 2011).

This article offers a critical analysis of the role of social policy in mitigating the social impact of the crisis. By necessity, broader issues raised in the public debate on what caused Greece’s current crisis, and how best to overcome it, are not addressed here.¹

The structure of the article is as follows. The following section reviews the implications of the crisis on the labour market and the distribution of incomes. The third section analyses social policy responses in a context of both cuts in benefits and services as well as reforms in social programmes. The final section reflects on the future of the Greek welfare state in an era of permanent austerity.

The demand for social protection

In May 2008 unemployment figures reached their lowest level for over a decade: 325,000 persons, 6.6% of the labour force. By August 2011 the corresponding figures had risen almost threefold: the number of unemployed workers had reached 908,000, while the rate of unemployment stood at 18.4% (ElStat, 2011).

Until recently, labour market institutions and norms protected ‘male breadwinners’, often at the expense of their wives and (grown-up) children. Without doubt, this was rather a socially conservative pattern: it stifled mobility, forced many women to remain housewives, and prevented many young adults from leaving the parental home before an unusually late age.² However, it had at least one key advantage: by protecting ‘primary earners’, it ensured that unemployment did not directly translate into poverty.³

As Table 1 shows, unemployment rose for men (from 4.7% in 2008 to 13.7% in 2011) as much as it did for women – by nine percentage points (from 10.9% to 20.0%). Youth unemployment (for those in the 20–29 age group) also increased by around 17 percentage points (to 27.8% for men, and 37.0% for women). Nevertheless, this time men aged 30–44 were not spared: their unemployment rate went up from a mere 3.5% in 2008 to 12.0% in 2011. Employment figures tell a similar story, except that the decline in employment was smaller than the rise in unemployment, especially for women (3 percentage points compared to 7.4 for men). Again, the fall in employment was higher than average for men in the 30–44 age group (from 93.8% in 2008 to 84.5% in 2011).

Table 1.

Labour market indicators by age and sex (2008–2011)

		Unemployment		Employment
		Men	Women	Men	Women
2008	All	4.7%	10.9%	61.9%	37.9%
	20–29	11.1%	19.9%	67.7%	50.3%
	30–44	3.5%	10.3%	93.8%	65.5%
2011	All	13.7%	20.0%	54.5%	35.0%
	20–29	27.8%	37.0%	55.0%	40.8%
	30–44	12.0%	18.8%	84.5%	61.8%

Note: Figures refer to the second quarter of the relevant year.

Source: ElStat (2011).

The impact of the crisis has been asymmetrical in other respects. In the broader public sector, job losses only affected fixed-term workers, since civil servants enjoy full tenure, while those employed in the utilities have open-ended contracts (practically jobs for life⁴). Job security is much more limited among private sector workers (especially outside banking, where a history of extensive public ownership until the mid-1990s has left its mark on industrial relations).

In the formal sector, workers are covered by collective agreements and protected by labour law (even though such protection – in matters such as overtime pay – is less substantial in practice than it is in theory).

Elsewhere, job losses were even more extensive, especially where production has practically come to a halt (as in the construction industry). Note that in the so-called informal sector employers are subject to no constraints other than those implicit in the free play of market forces: basic rights (such as a statutory minimum wage, sick or maternity leave, dismissal protection – not to mention the right to join a union) are routinely flouted.⁵

Generally speaking, job losses have affected manual workers more than non-manual ones, men more than women, employees in small firms more than those in larger ones, young workers more than older ones, and foreign workers more than Greek nationals.

The impact of the crisis on the labour market has taken the form of loss of earnings as well as of loss of jobs. On the whole, average real gross earnings for employees lost almost as much ground in the two years since 2009 (-14.7%) than they had gained in the six years before that (+15.9%). As Table 2 reveals, the loss of earnings was greatest in the public sector (wiping out all gains made since as far back as the late 1990s), and the utilities (where pay rises had been extremely generous in recent years). In the non-banking private sector (where, as mentioned above, job losses were much more common), real earnings lost 11.8% in 2009–2011. On the other hand, the minimum wage retained most of its real value (at least in theory).⁶ Finally, most self-employed workers also saw their earnings decline – although in this case reliable data are more difficult to find. Note that the self-employed are more numerous in Greece than elsewhere in Europe, and (as elsewhere) more likely than employees to under-report their incomes (OECD, 2011).

Table 2.

Real change in gross earnings (2003–2011)

	2003–2009	2009–2011
Public sector	+13.5%	–19.6%
Utilities	+32.4%	–19.6%
Banking	+15.0%	–9.2%
Private sector excl. banking	+16.2%	–11.8%
Statutory minimum wage	+15.8%	–5.2%
All	+15.9%	–14.7%

Note: Figures are cumulative change in real earnings, adjusted for inflation.

Source: Bank of Greece (2012).

In view of the above, it must be beyond doubt that the Greek crisis has caused severe income and job losses. But has it also caused poverty and inequality to increase?

Predicting the distributional impact of a crisis is less straightforward than may appear at first sight. Its effects on family incomes vary substantially, depending not only on the earnings and employment status of workers directly affected, but also on those of other members of the households in which they live, as well as on the capacity of the tax-benefit system to absorb macroeconomic shocks (Atkinson, 2009; Nolan, 2009). Moreover, the distributional impact may vary depending on the dimension considered: in a crisis, average living standards may decline, but inequality need not rise, and the estimated effect on poverty will be less pronounced when the relevant threshold is set as a proportion of average (or median) incomes than when it is held constant in purchasing power terms (Jenkins et al., 2011).

In other words, the effect of the Greek crisis on the income distribution has to be estimated directly rather than simply assumed or read off labour market or GDP growth figures. Since income statistics (whether national household budget surveys or cross-national ones like EU-SILC) tend to become available two or three years after their reference period (unlike labour force statistics which can be typically released within two or three months), the only realistic alternative to waiting is microsimulation (Atkinson, 2009; Jenkins et al., 2011).

Early results indicate that the crisis has compressed the distribution of incomes in Greece.⁷ As Table 3 indicates, inequality appeared to have fallen somewhat during the crisis.

Table 3.

Inequality (2009–2011)

	2009	2010	2011
Gini index	0.349	0.345	0.340
Coefficient of variation	0.798	0.770	0.776
S80/S20 income share ratio	6.060	6.033	5.837

Note: The S80/S20 ratio measures the income of the richest 20% of the population as a ratio of that of the poorest 20%.

Source: Author’s calculations using EUROMOD version F4.0 [http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/euromod].

Relative poverty (defined conventionally, as income below a poverty line of 60% of median) also seemed to be lower in 2011 than in 2009, although the reduction was of the order of less than half a percentage point. On the other hand, the proportion of the population below the 2009 poverty line adjusted for inflation had risen dramatically from 20.1% in 2009 to 30.3% in 2011.

As Table 4 shows, with the poverty line held constant in purchasing power terms, the rise in poverty was greater for men than for women, for younger persons than for older ones, and for households whose head was unemployed or a private firm employee than for those headed by someone working in the public sector (including banking) or in the professions (medical, legal or engineering). Given that the latter had much lower poverty rates to start with, it can be argued that the crisis has polarized the poverty experience of various occupational groups.

Table 4.

Poverty (2009–2011)

	2009	2011
		Conventional	Fixed
All	20.07	19.62	30.27
Gender
Men	19.11	19.12	29.56
Women	20.97	20.09	30.94
Age
0–15	21.23	22.92	34.54
16–29	19.25	19.84	30.60
30–44	16.25	17.58	27.81
45–64	19.13	18.92	27.67
65+	24.69	19.78	32.27
Household head is:
unemployed	52.67	60.52	68.66
employee (public sector or banking)	0.31	0.42	3.86
employee (private sector excl. banking)	12.75	14.31	23.96
member of the liberal professions	3.79	3.69	7.29
own account worker	15.77	17.20	25.00
farmer	47.13	43.37	55.29
pensioner	24.78	20.22	31.66
other	20.76	18.32	32.46

Note: The conventional poverty line is set at 60% of median equivalized incomes; its value (per month, for a person living alone) was €572 in 2009 vs. €507 in 2011. The fixed poverty line is the conventional poverty line for 2009 adjusted for inflation; its value (per month, for a person living alone) was €572 in 2009 vs. €616 in 2011.

Source: Author’s calculations using EUROMOD version F4.0 [http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/euromod].

Furthermore, it can also be argued that, on the evidence of Table 4, the impact of the crisis was inversely related to political power: the less powerful a group was, the greater the poverty (and the increase in poverty) it had suffered. For instance, the fact that workers in the public sector, the utilities and banking experienced extremely low poverty rates both before and during the crisis can be attributed to the influence of their unions within the trade union movement, which far exceeded the relative weight of the relevant industries in the labour force. Note that a similar argument can be made with respect to the influence of the liberal professions of medical doctors, law practitioners and engineers within Parliament (Matsaganis, 2007).

The findings for Greece are broadly in line with results for Ireland, where the recession was deeper, even though less protracted than in Greece (Callan et al., 2011), as well as with early estimates for other countries hit by the Great Recession (Jenkins et al., 2011).

Nearly 600,000 jobs lost since the onset of the crisis, an unemployment rate above 18%, another 5% of the workforce working part-time because a full-time job could not be found (Bank of Greece, 2011), and income losses severe enough to push a staggering 30% of the population below the pre-crisis poverty line in purchasing power terms: all this implied that towards the end of 2011 the need for social protection in Greece was more pressing than at any other point in the past since the end of the Civil War in 1949.

The question is: has the welfare state risen to the occasion?

The supply of social protection

In general, a recession (even a ‘Great’ one) should not overly trouble a well-designed system of social protection. Mitigating the social effects of economic crises is what public institutions spectacularly failed to do in the 1930s, but what (among other things) modern welfare states were created for:

Long lines of the unemployed caused by economic crises are the core business of the welfare state […]. These are precisely the kinds of emergencies that welfare state programmes and institutions are designed to deal with, so that when a financial crisis turns up we have routine mechanisms […] for coping with its consequences. (Castles, 2010: 96)

On the eve of the crisis, the Greek system of social protection fitted perfectly the celebrated characterization of the Southern European model of welfare as a combination of serious gaps in the social safety net and ‘unparalleled peaks of generosity reserved for the protected core of the labour market’ (Ferrera, 1996: 21).

Peaks of generosity were mainly – but not exclusively – located in the pension rights of public sector employees (in the civil service and the utilities) and professionals (judges and lawyers, doctors and pharmacists, engineers and architects). Workers in private firms outside banking and the self-employed got not as good a deal (Matsaganis, 2007). In a context of institutional fragmentation, the parameters defining entitlements differed enormously: for instance, the statutory retirement age for men ranged from 45 to 65 years for a full pension. Variation was also wide in terms of contribution rates, minimum length of contributory period, reference earnings and replacement rates. The general picture was complex, but systematic cleavages could be identified between groups of pensioners, actual or future. In general, pension rules favoured the self-employed over wage earners, public over private sector employees, middle-aged contributors over younger ones, standard over non-standard workers, and men over (most) women (Matsaganis, 2002; Featherstone, 2005; Tinios, 2005).

Elsewhere in the system, gaps in the social safety net were considerable. Child benefits were only substantial for large families, as were family allowances for core workers. In contrast, the majority of families – those with one or two children – received little or no support, even when they lived in poverty. Public assistance with housing costs was limited. The social rented sector was under-developed, while a means-tested rent subsidy was only available on a contributory basis, i.e. beyond the reach of most poor families. Short-term benefits for sickness or maternity ranged from quite generous (for labour market insiders) to non-existent (for non-standard workers). Contributory unemployment insurance seemed adequate on paper – but its duration was short (a maximum of 12 months) and its coverage less than complete. As a result of stringent eligibility conditions and very low rates of take up, non-contributory unemployment assistance failed to play the major role envisaged when it was introduced in 2001. Finally, Greece remained the only EU country where a comprehensive social assistance scheme, acting as a social safety net of last resort, was not available – not even on a local or regional basis, as in Italy, Spain and Hungary (Matsaganis, 2011).

As this brief outline suggests, the Greek welfare state was singularly unfit for the crisis. As a matter of fact, when the crisis did arrive, the policy response was rather feeble. A string of ‘special support schemes’ were solemnly announced, targeting existing benefit recipients to whom a few hundred euros were paid as a lump sum. Nor were social benefits safe from cuts to public expenditure. Pensions, especially higher ones, were drastically reduced: first as a result of the abolition of 13th and 14th monthly payments (replaced by lower flat-rate vacation allowances) then through ‘Pensioners’ Solidarity Contribution’ (a tax on pensions at steeply rising rates⁸). Social insurance organizations were caught between a rise in benefit claims and a fall in contribution income. In an extreme case, payment of means-tested Rent Subsidy was wholly suspended in 2010. In a context of rising xenophobia (partly fuelled by concerns about rising crime rates), the fact that most Rent Subsidy recipients were non-Greek (although fully meeting contributory and other conditions) made the scheme a soft target. A similar pattern was observed when in February 2011, on the helpful suggestion of the far Right in Parliament, a clause was added to the eligibility conditions for large family benefits, explicitly designed to exclude foreign immigrants (‘10 years of permanent and continuous residence in Greece’).

Funding cuts also affected the proper functioning of public services, even where the scope for efficiency improvements was substantial. Once again, more vulnerable beneficiaries suffered more, as the case of the Home Help programme – a popular domiciliary care scheme aimed at elderly persons able and willing to live at home if supported – demonstrates. Discontinued by the conservatives when European funds ran out, the programme was reintroduced in 2010 by the socialist government in a distorted version: now targeted to elderly persons living with unemployed relatives, the move secured European Social Fund financing but left an estimated 30% to 40% of previous beneficiaries no longer eligible.

In terms of reforms, the passage of Law 3863, approved by a narrow majority in Parliament in July 2010, was the first significant pension legislation since the early 1990s. The broad outline of the law had been laid out in the Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies agreed by the Greek government and the international ‘troika’ of donors (the EU, the ECB and the IMF) in May 2010 – down to the provision that in the new system the annual accrual rate should not exceed 1.2% on average.⁹ The reform, widely criticized as neoliberal, did indeed imply lower pension benefits and a higher age of retirement for all – especially for some of the privileged groups accustomed to getting much more in benefits than they had ever paid in contributions. Nonetheless, in terms of structure, the reformed system (to be introduced from 2015) might almost be described as Scandinavian – at least, by IMF standards.¹⁰

Specifically, the reform introduced a quasi-universal Basic Pension and a contribution-related Proportional Pension. The latter will be calculated as lifetime earnings multiplied by annual accrual rates multiplied by the number of insurance years. To enhance incentives, accrual rates increase with career length, from 0.8% per year for workers with fewer than 15 insurance years, to 1.5% per year for those with 40+ insurance years. The risk is that low-paid workers, with loose attachment to the labour market and uncertain career prospects, might see little point in paying contributions – and hence face poverty in old age. The Basic Pension was set at a modest €360 per month in 2010 prices. Access conditions fell short of full universality: those failing to meet the contributory conditions for a Proportional Pension will have to pass an income test as well as a residence test.

True to form (and against the advice of the ‘troika’ of donors), the reform accommodated the demands of the liberal professions, Bank of Greece employees and press workers to preserve their own separate schemes, effectively opting out of the reformed system. Moreover, it also protected the acquired rights of public utility workers and banking employees hired before 1983, and those of uniformed workers (the police, military etc.) irrespective of date of entry. Finally, the reform did not at all affect farmers, whose contributory pension was phased in gradually since 1998 on more favourable terms. In all these respects, the familiar pattern of powerful groups securing for themselves favourable treatment at the expense of less powerful ones reasserted itself – even under emergency conditions.

The welfare state at the crossroads

The current crisis – the deepest and longest in living memory – has caught the Greek welfare state poorly equipped to cope with its social consequences. On the other hand, policy responses over the last couple of years (with the partial exception of pension reform) failed to redress the system’s traditional imbalances and to strengthen social safety nets. As a result, the provision of social benefits and services left many victims of the crisis with little or no support, exactly when the need for social protection was greater than ever. The failure to protect low incomes (coupled with the widespread feeling that other injustices, such as tax evasion at top incomes, remained endemic) has dealt a blow to the acceptability of austerity policies. This, in turn, has fuelled protests against the cuts, and raised serious doubts about the feasibility of reconciling the expectations of markets abroad with the requirements of democracy at home.¹¹

This was not inevitable: a crisis does not necessarily translate into lower family incomes, nor into greater inequality and poverty.

Although GDP fell during the Great Recession, gross household disposable income rose between 2007 and 2009 in 12 countries (including Ireland) of the 16 for which we have data: the household sector was protected from the impact of the downturn by additional support of governments through the tax and benefit system. […] Remarkably, where the macroeconomic shock was largest – Ireland – the evidence suggests that inequality declined and relative poverty rates have been stable, a consequence of strong social transfers in particular. (Jenkins et al., 2011: 9-3, 9-5)

It now appears that European welfare states (in spite – or, in certain cases, because – of three decades of reform) reacted to the crisis reasonably well, at least initially. In the EU27, social expenditure as a share of GDP rose from 27.5% in 2007 to an estimated 30.7% in 2011 (CEU, 2010).¹² This occurred because unemployment benefits and income support acted as automatic stabilizers (Vis et al., 2011), because several countries extended the duration or improved the coverage of benefits (OECD, 2010) – but also because ‘in the first “fire fighting” phase of […] crisis management’ policy makers reacted by falling back on ‘their institutional legacy’, putting on hold ‘the general process of retrenchment’ (Chung and Thewissen, 2011: 367).

Clearly, this rather benign assessment may well prove short lived. Austerity policies in Britain and elsewhere could eventually erode the capacity of welfare states to support those suffering job or income losses in a recession (Taylor-Gooby, 2012) and undermine the public services on which low-income groups rely (O’Dea, 2010). But the game is still wide open: whether welfare states turn out to be able to ‘cope with permanent austerity’ (Pierson, 2001) or not will ultimately depend on the policy mix chosen and the political context in each country.

In the case of Greece, social rights have traditionally been so unequally distributed between categories that the scope for improving social protection, while at the same time trying to cut budget deficits, remained more substantial than elsewhere. Nevertheless, since the onset of the Greek crisis, policy makers have done little to expand coverage and mend holes in the social safety net (using savings from reductions in the generosity of benefits reserved for privileged groups). Rationing resources – scarcer now than ever before – by political influence rather than by need for social protection has reaffirmed itself as the guiding principle behind the exercising of social policy in Greece.

In the interests of social justice, this evidently has to change. But whether it will, and how it might, is a different story altogether.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The article relies partly on research in the distributional implications of the crisis in Greece jointly conducted with Chrysa Leventi. The author is grateful to George Prokopakis for advice on the intricacies of international debt restructuring, and to Isaak Sampethai for early access to Bank of Greece data on earnings.

Notes

Author Biography

Manos Matsaganis is Assistant Professor at the Department of International and European Economic Studies, Athens University of Economics and Business. Previously he has worked at the Welfare State Programme, London School of Economics (1990–1993), and at the University of Crete (1996–1999 and 2011–2004). His research interests include the political economy of welfare reform, the economic analysis of public policy, and the development of tax-benefit models. Recent publications: ‘The welfare state and the crisis: The case of Greece’, Journal of European Social Policy (2011) 21(5): 501–513; and, with Chrysa Leventi, ‘Pathways to a universal basic pension in Greece’, Basic Income Studies (2011) 6(1): 11–20.

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