Productivity per employee in Greece is at 54% of the European Union average, lower than 25 years ago, with the situation having deteriorated even after three bailout programs.
The increase in GDP per capita by 22% in the same period has actually not come from an increase in productivity, but from an increase in employment, especially compared to the previous decade of the economic crisis.
Given that unemployment hardly has any margin left for further reduction and the population is shrinking and aging, boosting productivity is the only way to continue the growth of gross domestic product and wages.
“Currently, there are 90,000 job vacancies in industry. The first criterion for building a factory in an area is whether the area has unemployed people so that we can find staff,” the president of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV), Spyros Theodoropoulos, argued on Thursday during the presentation of the study by SEV and the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research on productivity.
As for the connection between productivity and wages, the average annual rate of change in all three eight-year periods examined in the study is almost the same for both of these components.
