On his article Professor Nicos Christodoulakis, Department of International Economics and European Studies, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), addresses the main pathologies of the social insurance system and suggests a road map of changes that ensure a fairer treatment among the various categories of pensioners as well as between them and current generation employees.
Prof. N. Christodoulaki’s analysis, provides two major conclusions : First that short‐term corrections are unlikely to face the deep structural deficiencies of the system and a major overhaul is deemed necessary. Although public expenditure for pensions was reduced in 2011 and again in 2012 and 2016 in absolute terms, this is not enough to make the system sustainable in the long run. In fact, the policy is to some extent self‐defeating, in the sense that pension cuts (and especially on the lower ones) led to a serious decline in aggregate demand and caused a fall in output, thus further exacerbating the public finance ratio.
Second, that population dynamics are bound to make the fiscal burden even worse in the near future. With the present generation of employees burdened by higher contributions to support pensioners, the incentives to stay and work in Greece are diminishing as witnessed by the current surge of outward
emigration, thus further shrinking the basis for financing the rising population of pensioners.”
You can read the full analysis and article here: