Privatisation emerged, in the early 1980s, as the antidote to the ‘degenerating’ effects of the sprawling presence of the public trading sector and as the main instrument for rebalancing those states moving away from communism or communist countries wishing to reinvigorate their economies. Its lasting contributions were to operationally recognise the shifting line between the public and the trading private sector, create a space for providing more effectively and efficiently public infrastructure and social services and to bring in regulation to non-competitive markets. Although it has changed many economies in the last 40 years, privatisation appears to have lost its momentum.
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.