Few contemporary democracies offer tales of institutional failure as startling as that of Greece. Despite a turbulent political history in the twentieth century, the Greek economy gained ground during decades of actual wealth creation, until the country’s main parties started to compete on the...

During the years preceding the financial and fiscal crisis, Greece's welfare state had been mainly extending provisions in order to serve the political patronage system built after regime change in 1974. This system reached its limits as the number of active insurance contributions given by the...