Productividad no es lo único decisivo

Gran Krugman. Y sencillo...
 
Poland Versus Greece


Yannis Ioannides and Christopher Pissarides, in a new Brookings Paper, talk about the ways lack of structural reform hurts Greek productivity and competitiveness. I have no reason to doubt that there are big things that should change, and that Greece would be much better off if it could somehow break the political barriers to making these changes.


But I would argue that it’s very, very wrong to point to factors limiting Greek productivity and claim that these factors are the "cause" of the Greek crisis. Low productivity exacts a price from any economy; it does not normally, or need not, create financial crisis and a huge deflationary depression.
 
Consider, in particular, a comparison that should be made — between Greece and Poland. Poland, like Greece, is a country on Europe’s periphery, closely linked to the rest of the European economy. It’s also a country with relatively low productivity by northwestern European standards, indeed lower productivity than Greece by standard international measures:

But Poland has not had a Greek-style crisis, or indeed any crisis at all. Instead, it has powered through the turmoil of recent years:

What’s the difference? The main answer, surely, is the euro: by adopting the euro Greece first brought on massive capital inflows, then found itself in a trap, unable to achieve the needed real devaluation without incredibly costly deflation.

Every time someone asserts that the Greek problem is really on the supply side, you should ask, not whether it has supply-side problems — it does — but why this should lead to collapse. Greece seems to have about 60 percent of Germany’s productivity, which means that it should have real wages only about 60 percent as high as Germany’s. It should not have 25 percent unemployment.