Income convergence
…The harsh reality concerning the convergence of our incomes with those of the core countries of the European Union is that no nominal increase in pay can narrow the actual gap separating us from the main EU states. As long as landladies shout «permanent tenure or death» from their balconies (and are, in fact, vindicated) the country will sink ever deeper in an unprecedented crisis. As long as the Greek public is overwhelmed by a pseudo-leftist discourse advocating a closed, centralized and statist view of the world, of social relations and the economy, we will continue to disregard the need to improve our products and to increase the performance of the labor and capital. Some may envisage a return to the arbitrary economic decisions of the 1982-85 period. Others, however, can’t help thinking of the price we paid for the economic policy errors committed during that period. No unionist idea will ever change an economic reality that dictates that a pay rise which is not based on better productivity, when it exceeds the inflation rate and corporate profits, finally leads to higher inflation, lower productivity, together with a drop in investments and per capita income… Europe.
