Authors: Georgios Zois
Title: Overregulation and bad regulation in Greece in times of economic crisis
Abstract
Overregulation is a phenomenon that has accompanied the Greek state and its political reality ever since the first steps of its independent national life.
The 1974 constitutional transition and the new framework of the 1975 Constitution have fostered the aspirations for changing attitudes, institution modernization and rationalization in the production of legislative content. There had been similar expectations in 1981, after Greece’s accession to the European Communities and later to the ‘hard core’ of the member states of the euro area.
And yet practice has shown that the expectations were higher than the capabilities of the public administration and the capacity of political élite. Corruption, ineffectiveness, treatment of the state as a property of the currently ruling political forces, in conjunction to low standards, lack of studies and a lack of know-how, have exacerbated an already existing problem.
Almost twenty years since the turn of the 21st century, the same problems have been plaguing Greece and, even worse, it has been caught in the vortex of an unprecedented economic crisis that has evolved into a social, political, and, ultimately, identity crisis. The crisis could be a springboard for rationalizing legislation, but the examples are not satisfactory. What went wrong? What can be changed?
