If there is a country, which should receive our apologies, that is Greece. We need to apologize for having demonized a small and modest economy (less than 2% of the EU GDP) as the black sheep of the European Union and the challenger to the abstemious efforts that the northern economies have parsimoniously done, over years of sacrifices. Right before the financial crisis of 2008, Greece and a number of smaller EU member states were completely ignored by the larger audience, as the study conducted by MediaTenor indicates. Greece was featured as a great place for vacation, a quite inexplicable winner of the European soccer games of 2004 and a layback country, which was enjoying more than others the newly gained prospects of a novel integrated European market. In the same way, we did not know that Greece was the country with the highest GDP growth in the period 2001-2007 compared to other advanced economies, with peaks of Real GDP growth of 5.9% (2003), and averages around 4.5% in all of those years, well above the countries in western Europe and in par with what we would define today, “syndrome” of an emerging economy. Like this was not enough, the Greeks had systematically been the most hard-working people of the European Union, with over 2000 working hours per person, inferior only to Chile and Korea, when we look at data from the OECD (2012)
