Efficiency and Quality of Justice in Greece

Abstract

The significance of the presence of the rule of law, which nowadays is described as a coherent, predictable, speedy and consistent judicial decision-making process from case filing until final case disposition, on economic activity has been stressed repeatedly in economic theory – beginning with the thorough and convincing study of Smith (1762–3) and (1776), and including Montesquieu (1748), Posner (1998), Blanchard and Giavazzi (2003), Lopez-de-Silanes (2002), Acemoglou et al. (2005) and Dam (2006), among many others. There exists also an increasing number of empirical evidence, mainly as a result of the accumulation of usable data that supports such views. Dakolias and Said (1999) cite surveys of businesses in Brazil in which 66 percent of the respondents stated that judicial uncertainty directly harmed their business. According to a survey conducted in the Slovak Republic in 2000, and cited in the World Bank Doing Business in 2004 report, 80 percent of entrepreneurs indicated the slowness of the courts to be among the main three obstacles to doing business. The World Bank Doing Business reports for 2004 and 2005 cite evidence that in the absence of efficient courts, fewer investment and business transactions take place. Dakolias and Said (1999) also mention the result of a survey in which 90 percent of the businesses in Brazil cite delay as the main problem of the judiciary. Finally German employers consider, according to work cited by the Observatory of European SMEs (2002), that the unforeseeable outcomes of court decisions form a barrier that may impede the recruitment of permanent employees.