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by mitsakos
2385 days ago
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The argument that corruption is very high on Greece and hence people prefer to not pay taxes makes intuitively sense but it's probably also (at least partly) confirmation bias. Note that per https://www.u4.no/publications/exploring-the-relationships-b... there is currently no literature concretely correlating the two. The link suggests more research to be done in this area. Per
https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018 Greece is ranked 67 out of 180 countries in the corruption index with the admittedly not high score of 45/100. 100 is not the top at the score, Denmark is at first place with 88/100. So, relatively speaking, corruption exists all over the place, and Greece ranks mildly ok compared to the world. It also ranks better than all of it's neighbouring countries. Compared to the US or the EU, there's a lot of room for improvement of course. So there's probably more facets to the problem that just corruption. |
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"The scheme is a radical attempt to cast some light on Greece's huge shadow economy, the world's largest"
and let's look at https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/shadow_economy/
wow.. wait, Greece is barely at place #86 out of 158 countries. Hmmm someone did not do his due diligence here.
Then we have the following.
"Greece also has one of the lowest internet usage rates in the EU at 72 per cent". Per https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm it's definitely not great. Trailing by at 45/54. We can remove Vatican City, San Marino, Isle of Man, Svalbard and Jersey (all have lower rates) and say that's true. But it's written way more sensationalist than it is. The mean is at 87.7% so there is definitely room for improvement.
At least the suggested result is pointed out like that, i.e. "This suggests that some in the country could struggle to meet the 30 per cent target". Not sure why, but anyway.
And then we have a repetition of the argument above
"Southern Europe, particularly Greece, have booming shadow economies. A study by the Institute for Applied Economic Research in 2017 found that Greece had the largest in the world, being equivalent to 22 per cent of gross domestic product."
Wait, which country's Institude for Applied Economic Research? It's not at all mentioned. Googling it, it turns out it's Germany and the actual research is at http://www.iaw.edu/index.php/aktuelles-detail/734. The actual number of countries studied? 20. Not sure what the criteria for their selection were. Out of a planet with 195 countries that's barely enough to justify the above (and the original research does not make such sensationalist claims) never mind the fact that countries like e.g. Thailand have double that rate.
Overall, kind of meh.