Greece has not run a budget surplus in fifty years

Evidence

Greek politics in the 1980s and 1990s was dominated by the socialist Papandreou administrations that sought to increase personal income and public consumption, an understandable response to decades of instability, violence, and political polarization. These governments ran persistently expansionary policies that, given the country’s low productivity growth, resulted in increasing debts and widening deficits. (In fact, Greece hasn’t run a budget surplus in fifty years.) Debt to GDP passed 100 percent in 1994, hovered around 105 percent for a decade, and then shot up as a result of the financial crisis in 2008, reaching 165 percent of GDP in late 2011. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 176

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Mattei’s austerity critique and the foundational debt-vs-austerity debate; Greece’s fifty years of deficits is a key data point for the broader Southern European ‘profligacy’ narrative Blyth is dismantling.