Public Administration Reforms in Greece during the Economic Adjustment Programmes

Abstract

This paper summarises the approach taken by the European Commission during the Economic Adjustment Programmes (2010 to 2018) to address reforms to Greece’s public administration. It will argue that it was necessary to address this structural reform area as part of the programmes as well as post-programme surveillance. The paper will explain the challenges the public administration was faced with at the outset of the programme, as a number of macroeconomic imbalances that the Greek economy had accumulated prior to the financial crisis can demonstrably be linked to the weaknesses of the public administration. A reform of the public administration was therefore urgently needed and formed a key element of all three programmes. The benchmarking of structural policies revealed that Greece was underperforming relative to the EU average in many policy domains. Therefore, Greece needed to review the overall functioning and capacity of its public sector as well as addressing its public sector wage bill, which was well above the Eurozone average.