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Greece (capital Athens) and its islands (including Lesvos, Samos, Rhodes and Crete) and neighboring states
Country Comparisons:
2010: see chart
2010: debt and reserves chart
World Factbook: "Greece has a capitalist economy with the public sector accounting for about 40% of GDP."
Taxes
2004: Income taxes are progressive and moderate. Those individuals earning
less than 8,400 Euros per year, pay 5%. The lower middle, earning
from 8,401 to 13,400 Euros, pay 15%. Those earning from 13,401
to 23,400 Euros, pay 30%. Individuals earning above 23,400 Euros
pays 40%.
The government maintains social security programs for citizens, pensions for retired people, and free health services.
The Greek National Health Care Service provides free care to all Greeks at state hospitals. Private clinics were available that charged a fee for care.
As of 2004 Greece was receiving aid from other European countries equal to a little more than 3% of its GDP.
GDP annual real (not per capita) growth rate estimate
2010: -4.8%
2009: -2.0%
2008: 2.%
2007: 4%
Unemployment rate
2010: 12%
2009: 8.9%
2008: 8.0%
Twenty percent of its labor force is in agriculture, compared to for France 4.1% for France and 2.8% for Germany.
Living in an urban area
2010: 61%
Religion
About 98% of Greeks are officially Greek Orthodox Christians.
Southern Europe, east of Albania, west of Turkey, south of Macedonia and Bulgaria. 13,676 kilometers of coastline. Capital: Athens.
1952: Joined NATO.
1974: Overcame seven years of military dictatorship, abolished its monarchy and created a parliamentary republic.
1981: joined the European Community -- which, in 1992, became the European Union.
2004: Congratulations to Fani Halkia for winning the women's 400-meter hurdles at the Athens Olympics. When asked by a U.S. newsman about being a hero for the Greeks, she looked at him as through he were absurd. She was not interested in being a hero. She was running for Greece. "I wanted to show the world that the Greeks are high up there," she said. "The Greeks are born to be winners."
August 3, 2006: According to a BBC article, death rates on Greek roads are five times higher than in Britain.
December 9, 2008: Writes Malcolm Brabant for the BBC: "Rebellion is deeply embedded in the Greek psyche. The students and school children who are now laying siege to police stations and trying to bring down the government are undergoing a rite of passage. They may be the iPod generation, but they are the inheritors of a tradition that goes back centuries, when nuns would rather hurl themselves to death from mountain convents than submit to the ravages of Greece's Turkish Ottoman invaders."
March 2010: A higher percentage of Greeks are having difficulty getting by than the people of other European countries -- a cost of living versus income problem. Labor unions are strong. But the government has been spending itself into debt. Prices have been rising. The Greek Government is under pressure to implement an austerity program on top of this misery. This includes cutting government spending in order to solve its debt problem, which is out of sinc with EU requirements. Greece kept hidden the true size of its deficit. The deficit problem was exacerbated, or created, by widespread tax evasion.
The BBC: In the spring of 2010, amid fears of an imminent default on debt payments, Greece's fellow eurozone countries agreed an unprecedented $145bn package to rescue its teetering economy.
May 2010: Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes of Athens having 16,974 swimming pools, revealed by satellite photographs. But only 364 people reported to tax authorities that they owned swimming pools.
May 14, 2010: Michael Linden points out in an article online that Greece's budget expenditures are average among countries in the European Union -- less for example than Sweden, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Czech Republic. But Greece's tax revenues, he writes, are "clearly on the low end." In other words, it could be said that Greece has a revenue problem rather than a spending problem.
May 21, 2011: The finance elite of eurozone countries pressure Greece to step up economic reform in order to raise 50 billion euros to help reduce its debt.
May 23, 2011: According to the BBC, "The Greek government has said it will begin to sell stakes in a number of domestic corporations 'immediately' in order to raise cash to help reduce its massive debts."
Nov 9, 2011: Jim Hoagland writes in the Washington Post of his experience living in Greece in 1974 and his friends and neighbors not paying "many taxes of any kind -- as the European Union has learned to its dismay." He adds, "Greeks refined milking their government into an art, and they were certainly not going to treat the distant, generous European treasury in Brussels differently."
Copyright © 2009-2011 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.