Greece is a far more willing ‘reformer’ than it is given credit for

Although debt restructuring and austerity have defined the debate on Greece and the Eurozone crisis, the role of structural reforms has been less well-understood. Nauro Campos and Fabrizio Coricelli write that this is partly because analysing structural reforms is only possible through a re-examination of the relationship between the EU and Greece, which requires robust ‘counterfactuals’. Presenting evidence from a detailed study of the effect of EU accession on current member states, they write that Greece is the only country that has experienced negative growth as a result of its EU membership, but that this negative effect also shrank after 1995. They argue that structural reforms may offer one explanation for this successful shift.