Dr Dimitrios Katsikas (Visiting Senior Fellow, April 2022 - June 2022) focused on the political economy of Greece's growth regime. There is a rich bibliography on modern day Greece, covering various aspects of its social, economic and political life. However, there are only few works that attempt to provide an interpretation of Greece’s growth regime and its evolution from a more holistic, political economy perspective. The research of Dr. Katsikas seeked to continue and renew this strand of the literature by employing the most recent theoretical developments in the field of comparative political economy (CPE). The research aimed to identify and analyse structural features of the Greek political economy, in order to explain its evolution, and reveal the constraints it faces in its effort to adjust, in a theoretically informed manner that goes beyond the idiosyncrasies of the Greek case. The latest theoretical developments in CPE were particularly helpful in this respect because, among other things, they advocate the parallel examination of economic and political shifts in domestic political economies, an approach which offers opportunities for a richer, more synthetic and ultimately more comprehensive account for the evolution of the Greek political economy. Such an approach would also help uncover the dynamics of the Greek crisis. It would provide a fuller account of the crisis and its handling. It could for example, help explain the deeper than anticipated recession and the difficulty of the Greek economy to recover, and answer questions such as how and why the policy mix of austerity differed across governments and how these choices impacted the economy, why some reforms were implemented while others were not, what are the political implications of certain policies and reforms that were implemented, such as those in the labour market, and ultimately why, according to all indications, this unprecedented crisis and the three adjustment programmes were not enough to fundamentally alter Greece’s growth regime
Publications:
GreeSE Paper 176. Crisis, Clientelism and Institutional Resilience: reflections on a public sector reform under the MoUs, October 2022