Government In Greece Research Articles

Mapping the Donations of Pharma Companies in Greece: The Case of Scientific Societies

Pharmaceutical companies are major donors to medical-related civil society organizations worldwide, which has raised concerns about their influence on public health policy. The support provided includes financial donations, in-kind contributions and collaborations in research and awareness initiatives. However, there is a lack of transparency when it comes to these donations. While they contribute to the ability of recipient organizations to meet their operational needs and to conduct research, they also raise questions about the role of pharmaceutical companies in the formulation of public health policies. This paper aims to map the donations made by pharmaceutical companies to scientific societies in Greece, examining the nature and extent of the support provided, as well as examining the impact of these donations on the scientific community. Finally, recommendations are provided on how transparency and accountability can be strengthened. Further research is needed to understand the full extent of these donations and their impact on public health governance in Greece.

Examining governance and performance of utility companies after mergers: a case from a municipal water company in Greece

This study deals with the governance and performance of utility companies following mergers in local government organizations (LGOs). It is demonstrated by using the municipal water supply and sewerage company in city of Serres as a case study of how the reform initiative known as “Kallikratis” has impacted Greek municipal water and sewerage companies. As a result of the Kallikratis Program, the municipalities were merged, and new data were added to the map of local government in Greece. The methodological approach entails surveying the economic analysis of raw data using a number of financial ratios (financial statements of the municipal company). The study’s findings demonstrate that the municipal company of Serres was able to plan the actions that resulted in an improvement of the majority of the examined ratios after merger events, despite the extra responsibilities and geographic areas that the Kallikratis Program added to the municipal companies and the reduction of the extraordinary subsidies as a result of the Greek debt crisis. Eleven of the fourteen ratios perform better than they did before the merger, while three of them actually perform worse (2011–2018). However, various and contradictory results about the evolution of these ratios are seen over the crisis era, as some of them initially show a partial improvement (in the midst of the economic crisis period), but then they gradually deteriorate by the end of the crisis.

City politics under austerity in Greece: Place-based leadership for a resilient Thessaloniki, 2011-2021

The 2008 global financial crisis intensified our focus on the role of local governments as strategic actors, within current cycles of economic, political and governance change. This paper highlights the significance of Greece's second-largest city, Thessaloniki, becoming a resilient local authority, with the capacity to respond to perturbations, and the ability to self-organise and learn. Existing models of resilience were insufficient for explaining how a strong mayor's team was able to turn around the fortunes of the city. The paper uses a synthetic theoretical model combining the templates ‘behavioural resilience’ and ‘Place-based leadership’. The findings reveal that Thessaloniki's administration was able to respond to a unique set of problems, including the modernization of local services, balancing a problematic budget, opening the city to the world using some of its historic monuments and drafting an emergency plan for future shocks. The mayor's team was capable of galvanizing a network of key actors from the city's government, public, private and civic bodies to adapt and generate new ways of thinking and functioning in the context of change and uncertainty, so Thessaloniki appeared to offer a role model on how local government in Greece could develop strategies for overcoming austerity and stress.

Evaluation of the Efficiency in Public Health Centers in Greece Regarding the Human Resources Occupied: A Bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis Application.

In this paper, the overall efficiency of health centers in Greece is measured by applying the input-oriented model of Data Envelopment Analysis. In addition, four different models were subjected to the input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis to investigate the contribution of each category of human resources to the efficiency results of the health centers. The bootstrap technique was performed to generate confidence intervals for the models. Data for 155 health centers in Greece were provided by the Ministry of Health. The health centers submitted in the analysis obtained an average efficiency value of 0.932. The average results of the partial models in terms of each input show that the efficiency values achieved by the health centers are mostly influenced by the number of physicians and the number of managers employed. The second factor influencing the efficiency values of the health centers are the number of nursing staff occupied in the health centers. Non-medical staff employed in the health centers had the least contribution to the efficiencies measured. This paper provides important information for the stakeholders and the Government of Greece so as to better allocate the personnel employed in primary health care according to the efficiencies attained by the health centers.

Soil governance in Greece: A snapshot

For thousands of years, soil resources in Greece have been a critical underpinning of local socio-economies. However, soil threats are increasing rapidly, primarily due to human activity and the impacts of climate change. Greek and other European state governments have established legal frameworks to protect soil, but there is a great need for centralization and harmonization with European Law. This chapter highlights the importance of integrated soil governance frameworks that could be applied at the regional or international level while also supporting public engagement and local focus. It also considers the urgent need to address erosion - a major threat to soil resources in Greece that affects local well-being, environmental sustainability and heritage sites.

Reforming the corporate governance in Greece: After the introduction of Law 4706/2020

Good corporate governance undoubtedly is a key to sustainable private sector development and a basic element for healthy firms (Kostyuk, Braendle, & Capizzi, 2018). However, in Greece, the relevant legal framework was until recently anachronistic, whilst recent scandals in the Greek capital market revealed the regulatory gaps in the internal and external control mechanisms applied by listed companies and exacerbated the need for a significant reform in the corporate governance legal framework in force. The purpose of this article is to enrich the literature in this area and to present an overview of the state of corporate governance in Greece and particularly the innovations introduced by the new Law 4706/2020 on corporate governance as well as the good practices recommended by the recently adopted new code. By comparing the previous and the new corporate governance laws, as well as the existing literature in the field, our paper concludes that the adaptation to the general principles of corporate governance is quite difficult for most of the traditional Greek firms which are based on family ties. Furthermore, the financial crisis, and the current COVID-19 pandemic, created a highly unfavourable and challenging economic environment for Greek firms

Progressive populism and democratic constitutionalism

Populism entails a critique of liberal constitutionalism. There are many varieties of populism, and hence of populist constitutionalism. This article argues that inclusionary democratic (as opposed to authoritarian) populism is related to popular and political constitutionalism. They share a common concern against the excessive juridification and depoliticization of society, and they call for the democratization of constitutional law, considering its current elitism, professionalism and legalism—that is, its insulation from politics and the people—as a source of peril. The article examines seminal contributions on popular and political constitutionalism by Mark Tushnet, Larry Kramer, and Richard Bellamy. It then identifies the radical-democratic element that these approaches share with progressive populism and discusses some aspects of the populist constitutionalism of the SYRIZA-led government in Greece (2015-2019). Democratizing liberal constitutionalism may counter the rise of authoritarian populism; in that respect, some amount of “healthy” populism might be necessary to fight “bad” populism, the article concludes.

Greek Tragedy or Gestation Period: Future of the Modern Church in Greece

Greek Tragedy or Gestation Period: Future of the Modern Church in Greece

Coalition-making under conditions of ideological mismatch: The populist solution

This article problematizes how non-spatial factors facilitate the formation of extraordinary ideologically mismatched government coalitions. An intensive case study analysis of the SYRIZA–ANEL governments in Greece (2015–2019) suggests that a shared symbolic discourse directed against mainstream contenders allowed elite actors with widely disparate programmatic commitments to circumvent rigid constraints imposed by minimal range theory. Under conditions of acute polarization and socioeconomic upheaval owing to the Greek sovereign debt crisis, a strategic use of populist anti-bailout discourse upset the usual order of party competition along spatial dimensions, fostering cross-ideological cohabitation at the executive level between the radical-left SYRIZA and the radical-right ANEL for a total of four years. However, an office-seeking approach based on a populist symbolic framework to represent salient grievances cannot fully eliminate policy dissension. Once core ideological commitments become explicitly challenged, inelastic policy-oriented factions and voting blocs may ultimately precipitate the expiration of the populist coalition.

Reforms in Times of Crisis: Notes on the Greek Policy Making from Bankruptcy to COVID-19

In this paper, an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the “emergency” regulation in Greece over the years of acute economic crisis and up to the COVID-19 public health crisis is performed, to examine if this kind of regulation has been too extended and whether it undermined any effective policy design. According to our working hypothesis, the “fast-track” legislation highlights the fragmented and somewhat erratic way of policymaking in Greece, while it also affirms the country’s limited capacity to properly initiate and implement reforms. Thus, the paper focuses on the collection and evaluation of the legislative corpus during the 2009-2021 period; its objective being, on the one hand, to evaluate whether and how much each government resorted to the invocation of urgency and on the other hand to examine the documentation and description of the legislative process vis-àvis the imperatives and quality criteria of Better Regulation and EvidenceBased Policy Making. At the same time, the article focuses on legislative texts of the 2020-2021 COVID-19 health crisis period. It will showcase the latter as an additional trigger aggravating the “urgency” element of regulation, transforming it into a persistent feature of Greek policymaking. Ergo, we examine methods and practices at the international level, focusing especially on the Evidence-Based Policy Making paradigm. Based on the analysis of the crisis regulation and international EBPM best practices, the paper concludes with key recommendations for an effective policymaking procedure, dependent on the establishment of an integrated Center of Government in Greece.

Local Government in Greece at the Crossroads: Between Governability and Accountability

This policy brief is based on the assumption that the recovery of Greece, after more than a decade of crisis, should include local government, the institution, which is closer to local people than central government, and, consequently, ought to be more accountable. One of the most important problem identified here is the democratic deficit of the first level of local governance system. Despite its strong political and social clout, local government in Greece remains an institution with limited capabilities, as the Greek State has been and remains one of the most centralized states in Europe. In fact, after the 2019 general election, just before and during the recent pandemic crisis, the legislative initiatives of the government, despite the international trends of decentralisation towards more participatory and accountable local institutions, turned to the traditional and favourite “mayor-centered” system of local governance for the sake of the “governability”. As a result, the re-concentration politics of local government loom large for the post-coronavirus era.

Европейский левый популизм у власти: опыт Греции и Италии

The article examines the cases of Greece and Italy, the two European countries, where left-wing populist parties (SYRIZA and Five Star Movement, respectively) recently managed to not only enter the parliaments, but also even to form coalition governments. The author notices that in both countries left-wing populists followed the similar trend: the rise in electoral support during the period of economic and social instability (that was considerably more rapid and large-scale in Greece), high results at the parliamentary elections, forming a coalition government with a right-wing populist party (except the second government of Conte in Italy in 2019). After several months in power both SYRIZA and Five Star Movement saw a stable decline in their ratings, which has already resulted in the end of the coalition government in Greece. The author also focuses on the extent to which both populist parties were capable to implement their electoral programs. Finally, the article considers if the two left-wing populist parties, that originally positioned themselves as anti-elitist ones, will be able to maintain popular support after joining the political elite.

Economic Governance of a Populist Government

Abstract The focus of this article is on the main aspects of economic governance in Greece during the period 2015–19 where the syriza-anel coalition party was in power. In August 2015, the syriza-anel government faced the dilemma either to accept a new agreement with the EU partners (as eventually happened) or go bankrupt and leave the Eurozone, becoming detached from EU solidarity mechanisms. A third program was agreed, offering Greece an additional €86 billion loan over a three-year period. The third programme was unnecessary considering that the syriza-anel governance inherited 0.8% growth rate and some progress in the structural reforms demanded during the first two agreements in 2010 and 2011. However, the political choices made had the consequence of Greece returning to recession in 2015 and 2016.

Harnessing the power of dialogue: examining the impact of facebook content on citizens’ engagement

ABSTRACT The present study sheds light on the under-researched relationship between social media content and citizens’ engagement, as well as the impact of dialogic communication on citizens’ engagement. To this end, Facebook content of the five largest Greek municipalities was examined. A six-dimensional typology of social media content posted by local governments on Facebook was proposed. The results suggest that dialogic posts and posts that trigger offline participatory activities exerted significant influence on all forms of citizens’ online engagement. It is recommended that social media managers of local governments in Greece, as well as other countries with similar public administration styles and social media usage patterns, create dialogic loops with their citizenry by addressing users’ questions and concerns through Facebook posts. Moreover, they could publish rich media content on Facebook in the form of videos and posts that mobilise citizens to participate in various offline activities (e.g., events, council meetings).

The Complexity of the Law in Local Government Comparison of Greece and Spain

This study is part of Phd thesis about the effects of the complexity of the institutional framework on the operation of the local governance in Greece and it will compare the responsibilities of local government in Greece and Spain. More specifically, the different levels of local government will be compared, with a greater focus on the municipalities, in order to capture the differences and similarities that exist between the two countries. In addition, the research will examine the degree of complexity of responsibilities as well as the areas in which they extend. Based on the legislative and institutional framework of both countries, responsibilities will be compared in areas such as local development, social policy, education, etc. The content of local government is the administration of local affairs according to the needs of local communities, in these article we study the way this local government designs its structure and way of working for this purpose.

Evolution of e-participation in Greek local government

Local governments are increasingly developing electronic participation (e-participation) initiatives, expecting citizen involvement in local community affairs. Our objective was to assess e-participation and the extent of its change in local government in Greece. Using content analysis for 325 Greek municipal websites, we assessed e-participation status in 2017 and 2018 and examined the impact of change between these years. The assessment regards two consecutive years, since the adoption of digital technologies by municipalities has been rapid. The main findings show that Greek local governments have made significant small- to medium-scale changes, in order to engage citizens and local societies electronically. We conclude that the integration of advanced digital technologies in municipalities remains underdeveloped. We propose that Greek municipalities need to consider incorporating new technologies, such as mobile apps, social media and big data, as well as e-decision making processes, in order to eliminate those obstacles that hinder citizen engagement in local government. Moreover, the COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the need for enhancing e-participation and policymakers’ coordination through advanced digital technologies.

Formation of the first mechanism of the government of the Modern Greek State during the struggle for independence (1821-1827)

The object of is the process the establishment of mechanism of the government of the newly-formed Greek State as a result of national liberation struggle of  non-Turkish population against the Ottoman yoke. The subject of this research is the problems of institution and functionality of mechanism of the government, faced by Greece in establishing the first administrative system in revolutionary period. Attention is given to the Greek communities as a form of sociopolitical structure that comprised a local primitive political system of quasi-state structure, the form and content of which were determined with the end of revolutionary process. The author examines such aspect as inability of the community to perceive drastic transformation and new functions of administrative structures in the context of the new and unified bourgeois state. The main conclusion lies in formulation of the problems that emerged in establishment of mechanism of the government in Greece during the revolutionary period: absence of solid plan of national development; prevalence of the interests of pressure groups over socially significant decisions; unproductive role of Greek communities in the process of creation of  administrative mechanism in the context of development of production resources of the society; dominance of the factional interests of Peloponnesian leaders; state of “disastrous equilibrium” that impedes adoption and implementation of the universal normative legal act, the regulatory effect of which would be aimed at establishment and consolidation of formation an d functionality of basic links of mechanism of the government.

Volunteering for refugees and the repositioning of state sovereignty and civil society: the case of Greece

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the ways in which both state sovereignty and governance in Greece have been challenged by solidarity initiatives in unprecedented intensity. Since the beginning of the ‘refugee crisis’, particularly since the spring of 2015, multiple new actors have been playing a substantial role throughout the country wherever emergency conditions occurred. The paper examines to what extent state sovereignty and civil society have been repositioned through the involvement of these actors in the management of the ‘refugee crisis’. In other words: To what extent has solidarity towards refugees shifted both the scope of state sovereignty and the limits of citizenship? The analysis is based on empirical material gathered from semi-structured interviews with volunteers and activists who have been working with refugees in different settings in Lesbos and in Athens, as well as with representatives of relevant authorities.

Internal auditor perceptions of corporate governance in Greece after the crisis

PurposeThis paper aims to present the views of internal auditors in Greece on the relation between the internal audit function (IAF) and corporate governance (CG) after several years of European market integration and in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis.Design/methodology/approachData are collected using semi-structured interviews with 15 internal auditors working in firms with different size and in different sectors of activity. Interviewees have diverse experience and hold various positions in the firm.FindingsRespondents perceive a strong relation between the IAF and CG. They view the IAF as a preventive tool that provides monitoring and advisory services to firms. They stress the inadequate monitoring role of the board in the IAF, and they support a proactive intervention in the strategic audit planning process. They see a small role for shareholders in CG. They stress the need to focus more on the efficiency and effectiveness considerations in carrying out the IAF. They perceive CG-related information as important for meeting formal compliance needs rather than contributing to decision-making or audit process planning. They believe that audit committees (AC) are weak in implementing effective monitoring, due to inadequate knowledge and expertise of their members. They would like to see a two-way interaction between auditors, AC and management. They would like to enjoy more independence through the implementation of international standards of auditing and statutory regulation.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample covers 15 auditors from an equivalent number of firms and few sectors of activity. Accessing potential interviewees was difficult due to the perceived conflict between their work requirements and public statement of their views.Practical implicationsThe proposed method adds to the qualitative analysis literature with regard to measuring and evaluating the personal views of auditors on CG. The study provides empirical evidence of the need to use extensive qualitative research to assess the auditors’ views on the role of CG for their work.Originality/valueThe role of internal audit in CG effectiveness is a key policy concern, especially in countries with diverse market environments. Greece is such an environment for it has undergone a major institutional change within a short period and suffered greatly from its sovereign debt crisis. Further, few studies have sought and evaluated the views of internal auditors by using semi-structured interviews. The latter provide details, which other methods cannot capture. The results of this study are especially useful to the competent regulators, for they reflect market perceptions on the importance and effectiveness of CG practices. They are also useful to practitioners to identify potential root causes of audit deficiencies.

The 2019 Greek parliamentary election: retour à la normale

The July 2019 parliamentary election was the first national election since Greece officially exited the eight-year bailout programmes in August 2018. It was preceded by three ballots on European Parliament, regional and municipal elections in May 2019, which served as a decompression valve for the electorate to punish the incumbent government and indicate a clear will for governmental change, since the conservative party ND won by a landslide. Whereas ND’s victory in the parliamentary election was anticipated, it was its scale that would define the shape of the new government. Increasing its score by 11.76 points since September 2015, ND won 39.85% of the vote, securing a comfortable majority of 158 out of 300 seats. This is the first majority government in Greece since 2011, marking the return of the country to a new normality. Even if SYRIZA failed to deliver the anti-bailout programme which had initially brought the party to the centre of electoral competition, it still gathered 31.53% of the vote, losing just 3.93 points since its last victory in 2015, hence securing its place as one of the two key actors in the new two-partyism. Party fragmentation was limited to six parliamentary parties instead of eight, with the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, having lost its parliamentary representation.