>
This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened.That's actually BS based on urban legends (and inflated by the Greek government at the time for political reasons).
On actual life, this involved a small number, in the hundends, (literaly around 400-500 cases) of people using false certificates for stuff like disabillity pensions which happened in a specific prefecture.
Most of those instances were about bending the law to cover some poor person with pension that didn't really qualify for, but couldn't get any other way (e.g. getting a "blind man disability pension" to some seeing old man who without that would have become homeless or be unable to pay for his healtcare). In cultures were such social help is valued above legality, this is something that happens, exploiting laws or holes in the law, etc.
Of course this bending is counted as "corruption" (the same way that turning a blind eye in a poor families use of electricity when they don't pay their power company bill would), but its impact is negligible and is mostly a way to short-circuit ineffective social care policies in small societies. For actual corruption we have far better (and more impactful) examples in the higher echelons.
It wasn't legal, but it wasn't a "get rich quick scheme" either -- and it was far from "widespread" nor was the loss "so great". If we're talking Amdahl's law this is insignificant as far as the debt is concerned - but being a nice example against Greek corruption in general, it was blown out of proportion and used as an representative example.
Don't believe the hype. The same way the right wing blows some non-representative cases of people getting welfare in the US out of proportion.
In any case, Ikaria, the island in TFA, is not one of those places.
That's actually BS based on urban legends (and inflated by the Greek government at the time for political reasons).
On actual life, this involved a small number, in the hundends, (literaly around 400-500 cases) of people using false certificates for stuff like disabillity pensions which happened in a specific prefecture.
Most of those instances were about bending the law to cover some poor person with pension that didn't really qualify for, but couldn't get any other way (e.g. getting a "blind man disability pension" to some seeing old man who without that would have become homeless or be unable to pay for his healtcare). In cultures were such social help is valued above legality, this is something that happens, exploiting laws or holes in the law, etc.
Of course this bending is counted as "corruption" (the same way that turning a blind eye in a poor families use of electricity when they don't pay their power company bill would), but its impact is negligible and is mostly a way to short-circuit ineffective social care policies in small societies. For actual corruption we have far better (and more impactful) examples in the higher echelons.
It wasn't legal, but it wasn't a "get rich quick scheme" either -- and it was far from "widespread" nor was the loss "so great". If we're talking Amdahl's law this is insignificant as far as the debt is concerned - but being a nice example against Greek corruption in general, it was blown out of proportion and used as an representative example.
Don't believe the hype. The same way the right wing blows some non-representative cases of people getting welfare in the US out of proportion.
In any case, Ikaria, the island in TFA, is not one of those places.