This short book is probably the first complete review of privatisation in Greece from 1990 to 2019 and attempts to address some interesting questions. What were the driving forces behind privatisation, what were the obstacles, how systematically was it applied and at the end did it facilitate reforms and enhance the performance of the Greek economy?
Based more on necessity, rather than economic theory or ideology, privatisation served Greece well in times of both financial pressure and economic growth, by producing primarily revenues for the state. It caused a lot of political stir and hard debates, but feeding the treasury beat both the ideology of the “right”, to shrink the state, and the ideology of the “left”, to make all assets public. However, it changed little in the structure of the economy, most of it unintendedly, and it may have run out of steam in its legacy format.
