Has Greece Reformed Since 2010?

"So we ended with half-hearted reforms, which in some cases were not implemented or were eradicated after being approved. The biggest crime of all was that the political system relinquished reform ownership and blamed everything on the memorandum and the troika. Greeks despised the troika and the memorandum as they saw their salaries and pensions being slashed while taxes skyrocketed. There was little, however, in terms of reforms. Schools, universities, hospitals, red tape and justice, among others, remained more or less the same. Fiscal reform was carried out in the same way in which a dentist pulls out a tooth without using anesthesia. In the absence of other policies, lowering labor costs became the easy way to increase competitiveness. This failed to translate into exports and real production, however, as the entire system is anti-entrepreneurship".

This would be the major critique of Greece which foreigners make off-the-record when they are being blamed for 'having destroyed the Greek economy'. I was surprised to read it in an editor's commentary in the Ekathimerini. And I was even more surprised that quite a few of the readers of the article expressed agreement with it.

Personally, I am at a loss to judge this. On one hand, when I read reports by the EU Task Force, the Troika or the IMF, I always read that "Greece has made substantial progress...". Sometimes they include listings of all the items where Greece has made progress with reforms. On the other hand, the people who I meet in day-to-day life tell me the opposite. They tell me that they have to wait as long as before to get things done with public offices; that things are as complicated as they were before; and - sadly - that public officials are as corrupt as they were before.

One thing is certain: only if and when everyday people notice in their day-to-day lives that things are getting better will they start believing that things will get better.