Greek economic crisis management program and its impact on public employees' earnings: a case series and literature review

Abstract

The economic crisis forced the Greek Government to implement a series of controversial fiscal consolidation policies, also known as Memoranda of Economic and Financial Policy (a.k.a. Memoranda), resulting in internal market devaluation and significant inflation alterations in employees’ income in the public and private sector. The purpose of our study was to review the management program of the Greek economic crisis through the enforced economic and fiscal policies and measure its impact on public sector employees' incomes. The authors also presented case series in order to investigate the magnitude of that impact. The study hypothesized that the reforms taken during the Greek economic crisis had a substantial negative impact on employees’ payroll. The authors conducted a literature review in English until June 2021. They searched Scopus, IDEAS/RePEc and primary sources, such as Greek Government Newspaper, Bank of Greece reports, Greek Ministry of Finance reports, European Commission reports, European Union reports, Eurostat reports and Greek Statistical Authority (ELSTAT) reports. Moreover, in order to present the case series, the payroll data were collected from the office of a Greek public university. The study results showed that the fiscal policies that were enforced during the Greek economic crisis period (i.e. Memoranda) had a significant negative impact on the income of the employees of the public sector, irrespective of the employee’s educational status, with 2012 being the year, in which the highest rate of income’s reduction was noticed.