Better than not, but I can’t say I find this entirely reassuring as a predictor of future productivity growth:
With the exception of shipping, tourism is Greece’s biggest foreign earner, the mainstay of an economy that has otherwise contracted by 27% since late 2009 when the country’s debt crisis began.
The industry accounted for eight out of 10 new jobs in 2016, vital for a nation hit by crippling levels of unemployment. Bank of Greece figures show around 23.5 million tourists visited in 2015, generating €14.2bn of revenues, or 24% of gross domestic product. Last year, the country’s tourism confederation, SETE, announced arrivals of 27.5 million, an all-time high.
Increasingly, the sector has helped boost much-needed job creation, according to data released by the labour ministry. Recently, the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, said April and May had been record months for tackling the problem with 92,000 and 89,500 jobs created respectively. For every extra 30 holidaymakers a job is created, say officials.
Greek hotels and facilities could improve considerably, but the weather and ancient sites already have peaked.
Here is the full piece by Helena Smith.
How much do Greece and Turkey compete for tourists? When I went to Bodrum, Turkey in 2009, I could have visited Kos, Greece, which is just a few miles offshore, but everybody said it was much more expensive (due to the Euro). So I didn’t bother.
But back in 2009, the political situation in Turkey (at least on the surface — underneath it was no doubt the usual whirl of conspiracies and counterconspiracies) was seemingly calm and reassuring. Today, Greece sounds more relaxing.
Go to France. They’re nicer.
If you don’t mind bathing in the same water your sewage is dumped into, then take cheaper Turkey over Greece.
+1, I did both Kos and Turkey. Turkey is cheaper but more primitive, and some places will literally lock you into a ‘package hotel’ and literally won’t let you leave. You might as well be in a hotel swimming pool back home.
I disagree a bit with TC: Greece and Turkey are to a degree like abandoned lobster pots that constantly draw people to visit “at least once in their lives” (bucket list wish) so I doubt they will ever run out of tourists. They are both underdeveloped for historical tourism, unless you like (and I think most people do) a retired professor or attractive student spinning some wild tale that has little or no historical basis, but is entertaining (along the lines of “George Washington slept here”). Crete is nice for relatively upscale tourism in Greece.
Bonus trivia: the Philippines gets something like a mere one-seventh the tourist traffic of 19M people that Greece gets every year, and the biggest surprise is Thailand, which is growing at 12%/yr (!), and now gets 32 M tourists a year, double the number of 10 years ago (Rule of 69). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Thailand#Annual_statistics Sex tourism, and overrated IMO.
Weather has already peaked? So you think global warming will detract from Greece’s weather, not improve it?
What is your favorite weather? Personally I prefer cool and rainy places like northern Europe, but I assume that the Mediterranean climate is already optimal for most tourists.
Right? Maybe summer months get hotter but ultimately it would extend the summer seasons into May and September. Maybe Greece becomes more arid too. From a tourists perspective this is probably a net plus.
A warmer and drier climate is, indeed, a problem for Greece in general and for tourism in particular. Fresh water supplies are already stretched to their limits throughout the islands and much of the mainland, forest fires are increasingly frequent and increasingly difficult to stop (dropping salt water on fires in not a sustainable solution), and in some regions, southern Crete in particular (which has a climate like parts of Northern Africa), the heat and humidity combine to limit appeal to tourists in much of the year.
I reside in the Bahamas, a country even more dependent on tourism at 70% of GDP (banking is 20%). Providing visitors with a memorable vacation can be quite lucrative, and most people would say it beats working in an office or factory. In my experience the limiting factor is personality… cheerful, outgoing, engaging people are a minority in the workforce. That’s probably a limiting factor in any economy which is almost entirely service sector.
Per the World Bank, the value added in the Bahamian economy has over the last 7 years, been distributed as follows:
2.5%: Agriculture
17%: Industry (of which a quarter is in manufacturing and 3/4 in extractive industry, construction, and utilities)
80%: Services.
Exports of goods and services amount to about 42% of gross domestic product in a typical year. Exports are distributed as follows:
2%: Ores and metals
5%: Food
11%: Manufactures
4%: Miscellaneous merchandise
67%: International tourism and travel services
12%: Miscellaneous services (of which Insurance and financial services account for nil).
So, Tourism accounts for about 28% of domestic product.
They don’t offer statistics on the value-added attributable to insurance and financial services. Domestic credit as a share of gdp is less than half of what it is in the United States and about 30% lower than it is in France, however.
Translated to plain English : it’s a banana republic. And given open borders…dont expect Much improvement…
…more plainly — it’s just another tragic, predictable failure of socialist governance
luckily, there’s Venezuela … to make Greece look semi-civilized
Greece needs much less socialism, and much more privatization. Sell off government assets. Cut tax rates. Sell some islands to Disney. Oust the communists/socialists who ruined this nation. Get government spending down to a max 25% of GDP…from the high of 60%
Tell that to the “uncivilized” Swedes lool
Sweden
Frasier Institute ranking: 38th freest economy (first quartile)
Heritage Foundation ranking: 19th freest economy (“mostly free”)
France
Frasier Institute ranking: 57th freest economy (second quartile)
Heritage Foundation ranking: 72nd freest economy (“moderately free”)
Greece
Frasier Institute ranking: 86th freest economy (third quartile)
Heritage Foundation ranking: 127th freest economy (“mostly unfree”)
Venezuela
Frasier Institute ranking: 159th freest economy (fourth quartile, last of all ranked)
Heritage Foundation ranking: 179th freest economy (“repressed”, second-to-last of all ranked)
But, please, go ahead and tell me how the Swedes are socialist in some special, magical way that makes it so the advocates of the free market somehow can’t detect it. Do a good job, I’ll even join you in demanding that the US copy Sweden’s socialism in changing our corporate tax rate to 22%.
It is an odd clash of cultures. Greece has had thousands of years experience of being an international trading hub. Merchants all over the world. Greece could have been the Hong Kong of Europe. All they needed was low taxes, light regulation and limited corruption.
Instead the Greek Left opted to copy their Orthodox Big Brother and adopt a Soviet model. They have driven whatever industry there might have been into extinction. The euro probably did not help either.
So they have shipping – which the government cannot screw up too badly because the assets are off shore – and they are prostituting their beaches and young men. An industry it is hard to unionize and regulate to death.
Greece ought to be a warning of what not to do.
If the euro did this and the taxes did that and the regulation mdid that other thing, Greece would still be Greece.
“They are prostituting their beaches”. It is good to know someone else cares about the chastity of Greece’s sand and seas. It is an issue few people give any thought anymore. People think too much about gay cakes marrying and forget the issue of slut beaches.
+1
Greek wine exports have done really well. Have you tried a Moschofilera or Assyrtiko? They are incredibly refreshing, affordable, and distinct from other varietals.
I guess that is a by product of tourism – people holiday in Santorini, love the wine, buy it in their home country.
TIL, no black person is safe in America. This would include Lebron James, Michael Jordan and many others.
http://www.salon.com/2017/07/01/no-black-person-is-safe-in-america/
Terrible political culture. And the stupid goes all the way down. The few things you can say on their behalf would be that their resort to praetorian stupid has been much more circumscribed than Argentina’s, the Greek Church is a thing of beauty, and bastardy in the population has been much more infrequent than in the rest of Europe.
That they have a stupid political culture is not that interesting. Most people do. What is interesting is that they have such a stupid political culture together with such a smart business culture. In that they are like the Chinese whose domestic politics tends to be awful but whose business acumen is famous. Hence until recently the Chinese were rich in every society not run by Chinese people.
I assume the two are linked in Greeks. If they think that politics is all cheating and self-interest they may produce poor political systems, but they may also become rich by buying and selling to everyone. Well once anyway.
Greek hotels and facilities could improve considerably,
Around about 2002, an American journalist visiting Greece was in a car wreck and landed in a Greek hospital. By his account, the nursing staff sat in a staff room watching television and paid him no mind. Not a great service culture, I’d wager.
With the right management, seems like you can do “okay” relying heavily on tourism. Cyprus comes in at 21.4%, Malta 26.7%, Macau at 57.2% and Seychelles at 58.1%. All those have higher real GDP per capita than Greece.
“For every extra 30 holidaymakers a job is created, say officials.” from So Much For Subtlety
High taxes has not hurt London.
“For every extra 30 holidaymakers a job is created, say officials.”
Let’s see. I will generously suppose the average tourist spends 3000 Euros. Divide by 30 to get 100 Euros. I doubt you can support a job on that
You inverted the ratio. You multiply 3000 Euros by the 30 holiday makers and get 90,000 Euros spent to support one job.
How did you do on the math part of the SAT??
I often think similar things about California, where the weather has peaked as well. I’m a proud Californian and I’m glad we’re a cultural force for resisting 45’s tone and other nonsense, but this one-party state has benefited, let’s be honest, from having good coastal weather and its institutions are running out of time to actually start providing value to residents.
I hope Greece will recover from its economic collapse and not being part of the European union
I am just an observer. China seems to be using sending Chinese tourists as the soft power. With the disagreement with South Korea, eight million tourist number is in play. WIth the increase in tourism, infrastructure investments will follow.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/26/news/chinese-tourism-south-korea/index.html
“Chinese citizens accounted for eight million of the roughly 17 million people who visited South Korea last year”
Philippine,Thailand and Greece hopes to get some of that,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-09/fosun-targets-bringing-10-times-more-chinese-tourists-to-greece
http://www.oxfordbusinessgroup.com/news/surge-chinese-tourism-philippines
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-south-korea-spat-could-boost-thai-tourism-travel-group-says
For Philippine and Thailand the effects are two folds, South Korea most probably will promote internal tourism to compensate and the number to these countries will be reduced.
The problem is : those jobs weren’t created : they already existed, but the gov wanted to get taxes on them to pay 60k€/year retirement benefits to socialist party veterans. So they now exist by the grace of administration.
Tyler, Greece will never ever get better before all the governement pensions benefits die. And this prolly won’t happen before 20-30 years. Meanwhile, the state can sell the vast capital it has or die trying, fucking off the Eurozone