The “Success” of the Greek Bailouts

On the face of it, the troika’s (ECB/IMF/EU) bailouts of Greece, with their attendant demands for budget austerity, privatization, and labor market reforms, have failed and failed again — whether we’re talking about basic material well-being or debt ratios:

Currently, the official unemployment rate stands at 27 percent, while youth unemployment is above 62 percent and more than 30 percent of the population lives near or below the poverty line. In a nation of less than 11 million people, more than half a million children live in poverty—that’s one out of three—with nearly 60 percent of them living in households that experience “severe material deprivation.” The debt-to-GDP ratio declined from 170 percent at the end of 2011 to 156 percent at the end of 2012 (following a rather sizable “haircut” among private holders of Greek bonds) and will remain at unsustainable levels for the unforeseeable future. In fact, the best scenario envisioned by Greece’s international lenders is that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio will be reduced to 120 percent by 2020 — only 6.8 percent less than what it was when the debt crisis began in late 2009.

When the same policies are tried over and over again, with the same dismal results, there are plenty of potential reasons for an unwillingness to change course. As frequently noted, the allure of fashionable economic theories can long outlast the nuisance of uncooperative empirical results.

Along with ideology and pet economic theories, C. J. Polychroniou suggests another (far more cynical) interpretation. The bailout programs, he says, are succeeding in some respects; the problem is that we may be incorrectly assuming what the main priorities are:

Amazingly enough, in the face of this ongoing and uncontrolled catastrophe, and despite the IMF’s admission that it misjudged the impact of austerity on Greece’s economy and its people, IMF and EU officials remain as committed as ever to the policies responsible for Greece’s collapse. But while many seem surprised by this apparently contradictory posture, they shouldn’t be. The austerity “shock treatments” administered by the IMF and the EU have two explicit goals: (1) to ensure that the loans are paid back no matter what the cost, and (2) to roll back the average standard of living in order to create highly favorable conditions for international business-investment opportunities and to increase the rate of profit for the corporate and financial elite at home. It is an avowedly class-warfare approach, cloaked in the organization’s holier-than-thou rhetoric about the overall benefits of a neoliberal economic order and the economic drag created by organized labor and workers’ rights, social welfare provisions, and decent wages.

He makes the rest of his case in a new policy note.