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Actually you read it at the top of this page :-) I relink and requote:

Greece has one of the lowest rates of public employment among OECD countries, with general government employing just 7.9% of the total labour force in 2008. This is a slight increase from 2000, when the rate was 6.8%.


The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
by talos (mihalis at gmail dot com) on Mon Feb 20th, 2012 at 06:48:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]
well if there's fire under all the smoke about corruption in greece, where exactly is it?

can at least a microsopic part of these austerity policies do some good (devil's avocado), or are they 100% unremitting (heh) evil they seem?

if it's like italy, there's a lot of tax evasion, but when people see their tax money going to give emperor lifestyles to the politicians and little good services to the public they take the risk of not paying, justifying it by saying when they see tax money being spent better they'd be happier to pay taxes.

is it like that in greece?

corruption is so relative... in italy you'd get in serious trouble if you tried to bribe a cop for a traffic violation, in costa rica you'd get in more trouble if you didnt.

but everyone knows corruption is alive and well in the high echelons of italian state, organised crime and the MIC, utilities, energy companies, down to the local councils.

that book is being written every day. if austerity got rid of that, rather than teachers' salaries, pensions etc, we'd be out in the streets celebrating instead of protesting.

 

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 10:41:37 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Transparency and accountability will get rid of corruption. And if that's in the troika's program, I must have missed it.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
by eurogreen on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 10:59:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Transparency and accountability will get rid of corruption.

I would argue that it is most probable that this is deliberate and that the whole program being enacted is just a control fraud that operates through the control of EMU governing apparatus for the corrupt benefit of client bankers and wealth holders. If German citizens think that this vacuum cleaner will not come to their assets when returns from foreign operations diminish they need only look at the USA.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 02:05:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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