Reform In Greece Research Articles

The curious genealogy of the “executive state”: A critical review of the latest administrative reform in Greece

Abstract This article critically discusses the latest reform of the Greek administration system, which took the form of an Act establishing an “executive state.” It intends to make two contributions to the existing literature. First, it offers a critique of the executive state. Existing critiques generally focus on the bureaucratic concentration of powers in the office of the Prime Minister or the abandonment of positive elements found in previous reform attempts. However, they largely accept the reform as a technical response to the crisis. In contrast, this article presents a comprehensive critique that fully addresses the historic origins and contemporary significance of the notion and institutional forms of the executive state, revealing it as a political, rather than technical, measure that reflects deeper views about the relationship between the state, the economy, and society. Additionally, the article assesses the two main effects of this administrative reform—the centralization and depoliticization of policymaking—as manifestations of an authoritarian shift. The second contribution concerns the literature on authoritarian liberalism, which examines the authoritarian tendencies inherent in liberal forms and ideals. While several authors have explored the authoritarian tendencies of institutional reform in the face of crisis, this article seeks to explore the authoritarian phenomenon as part of a process of market capture and to examine its effects specifically on administrative law and structures. Ultimately, this article argues that administrative reform in Greece follows a rather sinister genealogy, and must be understood as an essential counterpart to the generalized and sustained attack on social and political rights following the dictates of the market.

Towards the new primary care reform in Greece: a focus on patients' expectations, views and perceptions from rural healthcare centres.

Patient perception of quality of care is an essential component in evaluating healthcare delivery. This article reports data from primary health care (PHC) centers before Greece's most recent PHC reform. The study was undertaken to offer some baseline information about patient experience, support the decision-making processes taking place, and provide valuable input for future policy-making comparisons in Greece. The research was conducted across the 16 PHC centers of Epirus, a region of north-western Greece, from June to September 2017, with 532 patients rating the importance of different aspects of three main healthcare domains (clinical behavior, support and services, and organization of care) of PHC provision. The Greek version of the European Task Force on Patient Evaluations of General Practice (EUROPEP) questionnaire was implemented for research purposes. Univariate comparisons were performed for patients with and without chronic disease, using Pearson's χ2 test for categorical data. Study findings support that the organization of care domain is of highest importance and priority, with clinical behavior and support and services following closely. Among recruited patients, on average, only 2.1% of patients with a chronic disease were satisfied (rated 4 or 5 on the Likert scale) with the organization of care aspects under consideration, compared to 18.4% of patients without a chronic disease. Furthermore, only 4% of patients with a chronic disease were satisfied with the aspects examined in the clinical behavior domain, compared to 27% of patients without a chronic disease. Finally, 18% of sampled patients with a chronic disease reported being satisfied with the quality of support and services provided, compared to 38% of patients without a chronic disease. It is necessary to back up available past information to afterwards estimate reform imprinting on expectations and perceptions. The items and aspects of EUROPEP, in line with the new tasks of the personal doctor within the PHC system that patients perceive as most essential, can be used to prioritize quality improvement activities to strengthen PHC delivery in Greece. Communication skills, practices, and behavioral change skills seem to need more attention for an efficient PHC model.

The blind spots of psychiatric reform in Greece.

The blind spots of psychiatric reform in Greece.

The Neoliberalisation of higher education: examining the 2021 higher education transformation in Greece

ABSTRACT This paper examines the 2021 higher education reform in Greece through the lens of neoliberalism. It examines how its basic provisions align with the neoliberal spirit and how this is defended through language. The paper also argues that this law confirms the role of the Greek state as a neoliberal, interventionist state in favour of specific interests. On this purpose, two basic parameters of neoliberalism are explored, the process of commercialisation of education and the process of exclusion from education, and the role of violence within neoliberalism. Finally, it imagines the possible outcomes of this law for Greek higher education.

The Contemporary Foster Care Legislative Framework in Greece: A Review of its Assets and Weaknesses

This review comprehensively analyzes the contemporary Greek legislative foster care system according to N4538/2018, exploring all the relevant international agreements such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights, that influenced its enactment. It highlights the rights and protection afforded to children in foster care, detailing provisions from the Hague Convention on the Rights of the Child and European legislation. It explores thoroughly the recent legislative reforms in Greece, including the establishment of the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption. It emphasizes the development and adherence to National and Special Registers for minors in the modern Child Protection System, as well as the implementation of Individual Family Rehabilitation Plans. It reveals that the recent legislation framework has many advantages but also a few weaknesses that could be amended. The legal procedures and criteria for placing minors in fostering in Greece, and the required criteria to ensure that foster parents meet the necessary guidelines to protect the best interests of children are discussed. This paper also examines the legal and procedural steps required to link children to foster families, the arrangements for supervision of foster parents and the consequences of fostering in cases of non-compliance. It is also proven that social workers play a key role in all stages and procedures of the application of the institution of foster care since they have taken up the main responsibilities for its implementation, prior, during and after the children are placed in foster parents. The article concludes that there is an imperative need for informed policies and practices that will ensure the adequate care and protection of minors in the foster system, recommending a synergy of legal, institutional, and educational strategies to optimize the welfare of foster children and support foster parents.

Exploring the Connection between “Out of Eden Learn” and Competency-based Education

Competency-based education represents an important priority for several countries worldwide. Although national governments and international education communities have identified a wide range of competencies as integral for meeting 21st century learning requirements there is a lack of evidence on how can these be effectively taught, learnt, and assessed in the classroom. A promising approach for competency-based education is “Out of Eden Learn”, a research initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that incorporates several strategies such as thinking routines and dialogue tools that are carefully crafted to facilitate the development of core competencies among learners. This study looks at the “Skills Labs” competency-based educational reform in Greece and presents the process of using “Out of Eden Learn” to develop a curriculum that is both supportive of fostering the requisite competencies and responsive to the needs of primary teachers. A survey questionnaire was used to investigate the views of 120 teachers who piloted the curriculum in 82 kindergarten and elementary schools across Greece. The findings not only reveal the value of “Out of Eden Learn” approach for competency-based education, but they also indicate the interdisciplinarity and the transferability of its related strategies that can guide curriculum design and teaching practice in an array of international educational contexts.

After the last good year: trade unions and educational reform in Greece

ABSTRACT Education policy research has seen a growing interest in the consequences of teacher trade unionism of global education reform. Less attention has been paid to teacher unions as strategic social actors attempting to influence both national education policy and employment relations at the school level. Addressing this topic, the article examines the challenges and dilemmas of teacher trade unions as they negotiate education policies in crisis contexts. With a particular concern for school and teacher evaluation, it focuses on reforms in Greek education, as these have played out in a period of structural adjustment and prolonged austerity (2010–2023). Drawing on interview data with leading members of the primary and secondary teacher unions, the article discusses the conditions in which reforms have emerged and the responses they have evoked from teacher unions in an education state undergoing historically significant change. It argues that the crisis provoked uncertainties of strategy in Greek teacher unionism. Nevertheless, unions maintain their identity as active components of movements for educational change and as organisations that aim to defend the status and working conditions of their members. Debates in Greece highlight a combination of economic and political aspirations, characteristic of teacher unions across Southern Europe.

Crisis and reform in Greece: a theoretical discussion on the domestic policy environment

ABSTRACT This article examines the domestic reform environment in Greece during the Eurozone crisis and explores how it affected the policy implementation process. It provides an integrated theoretical approach by combining the elements of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The ACF and NPF prove useful in explaining the tumultuous implementation of the three memoranda in Greece. The pro-memorandum/pro-change coalition emerged weak in Greece and was destined to fall apart in a short time due to its failure to employ effective narrative strategies. On the other hand, the status-quo coalition and its belief system emerged stronger by utilizing effective narrative strategies. These factors resulted in a lack of broader social and political consensus regarding the necessity of reforms during the initial phase of the crisis, ultimately leading to a continuous cycle of disarray and external conditionality.

Evaluation and its politics: trade unions and education reform in Greece

ABSTRACT The implementation of global teacher and school evaluation reform has often been contentious, in ways that differ according to national context. Teacher trade unions have frequently been active opponents of reform but their strategies and motivations have been relatively little studied. This article examines evaluation reform in Greece and the role of teacher trade unions in contesting it. It situates current collisions over policy in the context of Greek politico-administrative traditions, of past relations between unions and governments and of the austerity that followed post-2010 structural adjustment programmes. It places education policy change in the broader context of state reformation and contributes to understanding its inherent politics. Working with insights from Nicos Poulantzas, it identifies evaluation reform as a restructuring of the Greek state, where relationships between central authority and political actors such as unions have been reset, weakening the position of the latter. Drawing from interviews with union representatives, it analyses their reading of policy change and the dilemmas that faced them in responding to evaluation policies. In doing so, it points out the political role of teacher trade unions in both historical and contemporary terms while also highlighting the uncertainty of their response to evaluation reform.

The Greek Urban Policy Reform through the Local Urban Plans (LUPs) and the Special Urban Plans (SUPs), Funded by Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)

The lack of defined land uses in most parts of Greece (80%) has led to multiple environmental problems and phenomena of informal (arbitrary) construction with secondary side effects, such as a lack of basic technical and environmental infrastructure, unfair competition among private investors, the strengthening of climate change (increase in the number of urban diffusion) and the decline of natural and cultural resources. The Greek urban policy, over the last 100 years, has not succeeded in limiting these problems and for that reason the new Law 4759/2020 is expected to promote the development of a more efficient spatial planning system reform implemented through the Local Urban Plans (LUPs) and the Special Urban Plans (SUPs) that are funded by the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). These programs will contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage and to the development of productive activities at both local and national levels, especially on the sectors of renewable energy sources, the circular economy, and the construction of “green” materials, digital applications and products etc. LUPs and SUPs are related to the holistic reform of the national urban policy and the relevant planning system that horizontally affects a wide range of policy areas such as: environmental protection and adaptation to climate change (for natural ecosystems and biodiversity; agriculture; forestry; fisheries; water resources; coastal zones), built environment and development, protection of historic sites and buildings, allocation of the public infrastructure, allocation of investments etc. The General Secretariat of Spatial Planning and Urban Environment Ministry of Environment and Energy has the main responsibility for the implementation procedures of all the proposed actions that will start in 2022 and will end in 2026. This paper focuses on the analysis of the current urban policy reform in Greece and the reasons that this reform is considered an immediate necessity in the current Greek urban legislative framework and the expected outcomes of LUPs and SUPs, which are examined in the literature for the first time, contributing to research on the present EU planning systems.

Teby-Smoleńsk-Warszawa [Thebes-Smoleńsk-Warsaw

<i>Teby-Smoleńsk-Warszawa</i> [Thebes-Smoleńsk-Warsaw

The Pharmaceutical Policy Reforms in Greece during the Economic Crisis, 2010-2015

In the decade 2000-2009 Greece had the higher rate of public pharmaceutical expenditures as a percentage out of the total public health expenditure and the bigger per capita consumption of public pharmaceutical expenditure among the EU countries. At the end of this decade, Greek governments confronted with this “paradox” and tried to reduce it unsuccessfully. In order to finance its debt, Greece took a financial package of 110 billion € from Troika of the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) under strict conditions and adopted austere policies designed by Troika all over the public finance sector in order to reduce its debts. Our aim is to provide an overview of new legislation starting from the first memorandum until the first quarter of 2014 and to record the impact of pharmaceutical reforms in all over the pharmaceutical chain. The legislation of this period had the reduction in public pharmaceutical expenditures as a primary endpoint. The new laws focus on new drug pricing policies, profit control regulations, and demand regulations. The economic targets in order to decrease public pharmaceutical expenditures were achieved but not without cost, all the parts in the pharmaceutical chain were affected, especially the last link the patients.

Reformingsuo tempore: Exploring the unintended consequences of the European Union’s ‘reform actorness’

The European Union is broadly considered a benign reform actor, encouraging and supporting reforms in member states and beyond. However, European Union-induced reforms do not only generate the intended effects; they can also trigger unintended consequences for other reforms. These unintended consequences occur primarily through the impact of European Union-induced reforms on the resources available. The scope and size of the unintended effects will be conditioned by the domestic cycles in economic and public policy-making. Here, we apply our analytical framework to study the resilience of governance reforms in Greece during the period of fiscal consolidation (2010–2015), highlighting the unintended consequences of the European Union’s ‘reform actorness’. We find that the distinction between financial and non-financial resources is critical in unpacking the unintended consequences of any exogenously driven reform. Depending on the current stage in the cycles, the impact on non-financial resources can generate positive side-effects that help prevent other ongoing domestic reforms being derailed.

Secondary schools’ efficiency performance and reforms in Greece: a bootstrap DEA and multilevel approach

Secondary schools’ efficiency performance and reforms in Greece: a bootstrap DEA and multilevel approach

The importance of selected structural competitiveness indicators for exports : a comparative analysis between the euro area and Greece

Structural (non-price) competitiveness departs from price or cost competitiveness and captures a multitude of dimensions, both quantitative and qualitative, affecting the trade and openness of a country. Greece over time has lagged behind in key structural competitiveness indicators relative to other euro area countries, but has improved its position in some of the indicators in the recent years, in terms of relative prices and unit labour costs. The paper examines the evolution of selected price and structural competitiveness indicators approximated with institutional quality indicators (published by international organisations), recording the performance of Greece and euro area countries over the last decade, on an annual basis, in order to gain more insight into how exports are affected. A panel regression of an export demand function is estimated for the 19 euro area member countries, separately for each of the selected indicators. It is confirmed that structural competitiveness, along with price competitiveness, has played an important role in determining exports in the euro area and in Greece over the 2007-19 period. Greater sensitivity of Greek exports to institutional quality indicators is found, compared with average euro area exports. This is an indication of the faster pace of reform implementation in other euro area countries, while the reforms in Greece are in a process of catching up. The implementation of structural reforms in the direction of improving institutional deficiencies has contributed, among other factors, to the observed post-crisis export-led growth in Greece. In conclusion, the pace of reforms already under way should be accelerated and this will be mirrored in the structural competitiveness indicators of the country and expressed as better scores and higher rankings converging towards the performance of the other euro area countries.

Public-sector reform: Lessons from the privatisation experiment in Greece

This paper explores the process of public sector reform in Greece through the lens of privatisation. It is suggested that the transformation of the domestic post-war interventionist state into the current market-oriented paradigm has been disrupted and dependent on changing reform rationales. Along with the effect of historical dynamics on the direction and scale of change, the explanatory power of external determinants of reform is stressed. Findings reflect a direct linkage between the intensity of external pressure and the pace of reforms. The sustainability of gradual privatisation reforms seems more certain than the outcomes of fast-track privatisations under policy conditionality.

The effectiveness of primary health care reforms in Greece towards achieving universal health coverage: a scoping review

IntroductionBetween 2010 and 2018, Greece implemented an Economic Adjustment Programme and underwent a series of extensive reforms, including in the health sector. We conducted a scoping review to examine whether the Primary Health Care reforms during that period assisted the country in moving towards Universal Health Coverage.MethodsWe performed a review of the literature on the following databases: Scopus, PubMed, Epistemonikos, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, including published research articles and grey literature. Findings were synthesised thematically, using the World Health Organization Universal Health Coverage dimensions: population coverage, service coverage, and financial protection.ResultsForty-four documents were included in this review. Out of these, thirty-eight were research-based (thirty-three qualitative, two quantitative, and three mixed design studies), two grey literature, and four legislative bills. The evidence suggests that despite the systemic interventions addressing longstanding distortions, population coverage, service coverage and financial protection have not significantly improved.ConclusionsThis review suggests that Primary Health Care reforms in Greece have not managed to substantially improve Universal Health Coverage, although some positive steps towards that direction have taken place with the establishment of community-based multidisciplinary health teams. Before further interventions are implemented, an evidence-based monitoring and evaluation mechanism is necessary in order to clearly evaluate their effectiveness and progress.

Health Care Reform in Greece: Progress and Reform Priorities

We review Greek public sector healthcare policies and health-related outcomes since 2010.We find that excess spending was successfully curtailed, elements of the institutional framework were modernized, and health outcomes have been relatively favorable. However, especially prior to Covid-19, public healthcare spending had been compressed to potentially unsustainable levels, with widening inequalities and large unmet needs, especially among the poor. Higher public spending and advancing structural healthcare reforms are needed to improve the efficiency and equity of the Greek healthcare system, including strengthening primary healthcare, reducing out-of-pocket payments, and eliminating remaining insurance gaps.

The 2017 Primary Health Care (PHC) reform in Greece: Improving access despite economic and professional constraints?

Between 2010 and 2018 Greece was subject to a bailout programme by international creditors and three successive Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAP). These involved large-scale austerity measures and drastic reductions in public sector spending including healthcare. Within this context and in line with the international best practice guidelines for primary care, in August 2017 the left-wing SYRIZA government passed a law for the reform of the Primary Health Care (PHC) sector. The reform introduced the establishment of Local Health Units and the embedded notion of the ‘family doctor’ as the first pillar of healthcare provision. These reforms aimed to strengthen primary care and to improve access to publicly provided primary care services. Despite the promising claims, the reform was a subject of criticism and failed to engage key stakeholder groups and to be delivered within the original timeline. The aim of this paper is to present the chronicle of the reform, its current status at a national level and its implementation challenges. To address current implementation hindrances, the reform of the Greek PHC sector is expected to undergo systemic changes, including factoring in the scheme’s funding needs after 2021, with the successive government reconsidering its future form.

Is one judging head the same as three: a natural experiment on individuals vs teams

This paper utilises a natural experiment to investigate the differences between decisions taken by individuals and teams. In 2012 a judicial reform in Greece replaced three-member judicial panels with single-member ones. The assignment of judges to panels is exogenous, via a lottery. The assignment of defendants to panels is based on a date cut-off. Crucially, cases are tried by both types of panels in parallel. Our dataset contains 1723 observations, the universe of decisions regarding drug trafficking offences over 18 months from the court of Athens. We find that single-member panels are significantly more likely to convict a defendant. The length of sentences does not differ by panel-type but the variance of sentences imposed by single-member panels is lower than that of three-member panels, in line with a model of group polarisation due to information aggregation. We complement our analysis with an original survey of 142 judges that sheds more light on the mechanisms driving our results.