Imperialist Exploitation and Crisis of the Greek Economy: a Study

The Greek Crisis Under Structural Constraints

“…Following the existing literature, we now estimate the profit rate in Greece to reflect the general condition of its capital accumulation (Basu 2013;Duménil and Lévy 2002;Economakis, Androulakis, and Markaki 2014;Kliman 2009). The formula to calculate profit rate is listed below, where Y is net value added, W is total labor compensation, K is stock of fixed capital, and Π is profit:…”

“…As the key variable to reflect the condition of productive accumulation, the fluctuation of profit rate becomes another key feature of the Greek economy emphasized by the Marxist literature (Economakis, Androulakis, and Markaki 2014;Maniatis andPassas 2013, 2014;Mavroudeas and Paitaridis 2014a;Tsoulfidis and Tsaliki 2014). Ignoring technical details, the literature has found that compared with the golden age of capitalism, the profit rate in Greece experienced a fast decline in the stagflation period and only partially recovered in the neoliberal era.…”

“… 2 The Marxist analysis of the Greek crisis that emphasizes studying the long-term movement of the profit rate shares common features with our framework, except for Tsoulfidis and Tsaliki’s (2014) study, which exclusively focuses on the discussion of the profit rate, and they do not further relate it to the external factors and the financial aspect of the Greek crisis. Economakis, Androulakis, and Markaki’s (2014) study relates the decline of Greece’s competitiveness and the external environment including the EU and EMU faced by Greece, but they have not included the discussion on the detailed mechanisms of this process and fail to relate the weak profit rate to the financial aspect of the Greek crisis. Maniatis and Passas’s (2013, 2014) studies more explicitly discuss why the accumulation of debts in Greece was not sustainable, but they do not emphasize the external constraint faced by Greece.…”

Measuring the International Structural Competitiveness and the Hierarchy of National Economies: The Case of the European Union

“…The more developed countries mostly produce and export commodities of higher technological level and higher income elasticity of demand compared to those produced by the less developed countries (Prebisch 1959;Krugman 1989;Thirlwall 1999;Economakis et al 2014Economakis et al , 2015Economakis et al , 2018. This means that there is a dissimilarity in the structure of production-trade between the more and the less developed countries, which is reflected in the different "relative" income elasticities of demand, that is income elasticities of demand for an economy's exports against those for its imports (Krugman 1989;Thirlwall 1991;Trigg 2020).…”

“…This, results, ceteris paribus, in faster growing prices for the products produced by the more developed countries, that is the terms of trade change against the less developed countries. Thus, economic growth for the less developed countries is accompanied by increasing import payments, in other words, trade deficits (see Singer 1950;Prebisch 1959;Love 1980;Ocampo 1986;Economakis et al 2014Economakis et al , 2015Economakis et al , 2018.…”