Guaranteed Minimum Income ‘à la Grecque’: The chronicle of a long-awaited scheme

Abstract

This article chronicles the history of the guaranteed minimum income (GMI) in Greece, a third-generation social assistance scheme targeted at individuals and families facing extreme poverty. Greece has only recently experimented with the scheme, with full nationwide implementation being expected in January 2017. Drawing on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources and interviews with key stakeholders, the article first highlights how the indifferent and segmented attitudes of political parties, within an environment marked by the hesitant attitude or even absence from the GMI debate of other types of social and political actors who had influenced that debate in other countries, led to long-term inertia over the GMI. Moreover, the relatively recent decision to implement the scheme should be viewed in the light of the severe implications of the crisis and austerity measures. The article additionally focuses on the evaluation of the GMI pilot programme and shows how, despite its obvious utility, the evaluation underscores chronic problems of the Greek state, such as the improvisatory nature of policy-making, including the lack of an effective design for the evaluation process itself.