The Greek Great Depression from a neoclassical perspective

This paper follows the great depression methodology of Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007) to study the importance of total factor productivity (TFP) in the Greek economic crisis over the period 2008-2017. Using growth accounting and the neo- classical growth model, the paper shows that exogenous changes in TFP are crucial for the Greek depression. The theoretical model reproduces quite well the decline in economic activity over 2008-2013 and the subsequent period of slow recovery found in the data. Nevertheless, it is less successful in predicting the magnitude of the decline in output and the labour factor. In addition, including financial frictions and risk shocks into the neoclassical growth model, does not significantly improve the model’s performance.