The Greek crisis which began six years ago, is an extreme case that has brought to light deficiencies of the euro area. It was characterized by a series of untimely and vainly punitive decisions on the part of the other member states of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), unbearable and unattainable requests to make macroeconomic adjustments and reforms on the part of European institutions, and encouraging but eventually fruitless commitments on the part of the Greek government.

These circumstances ended up maximizing the economic and social costs linked to the preexisting structural fragility of Greece, causing the financial size of the aid programs promoted by EMU members and European institutions to balloon, and resulting in partial and distorted adjustments of the Greek economy. Those adjustments pointed out that the expectations of growth and well-being characterizing Greece at the beginning of the new century were misleading, but they also contributed to lead the Greek economy to depression and Greek society to a state of emergency.

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