Giorgos Meramveliotakis and Μanolis Μanioudis, Sustainable Development, COVID-19 and Small Business in Greece: Small Is Not Beautiful (2021)
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Article by Giorgos Meramveliotakis and Manolis Manioudis of Neapolis University Pafos in Administrative Sciences 11: 90, published 1 September 2021, on how Greek economic policy treats small business. Through textual analysis of Greece's Structural Adjustment Programs, assessment reports and the Development Plan for the Greek Economy, the authors argue that the dominant policy idea is that small is not beautiful. They point to a policy paradox: Greek small businesses received or expected to receive limited financial support despite their importance to the economy. The documents, they argue, treat the large share of small firms as a structural impediment to growth, implying a selection process in which only firms that grow survive and most small firms exit the market.
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administrative
sciences
Article
Sustainable Development, COVID-19 and Small Business in
Greece: Small Is Not Beautiful
Giorgos Meramveliotakis * and Manolis Manioudis
Department of Economics and Business, Neapolis University Pafos, Paphos 8042, Cyprus;
m.manioudis@nup.ac.cy
* Correspondence: g.meramveliotakis@nup.ac.cy
Abstract: The aim of this article is s to show that contrary to the common parlance and to the
widespread belief that treats small business as “the backbone of the economy”, in the sense of being
the prime motor of wealth and prosperity, therefore the underlying logic is what is good for small
business will also help government achieves overall economic policy goals, the prevailing dominant
idea that formulates and drives the Greek economic policy is quite the opposite. Based on textual
analysis, from Greece’s Structural Adjustment Programs, to the various assessment reports, till the
latest “Development Plan for the Greek Economy”, we attempt to reveal that the prevailing idea that
penetrates the abovementioned texts is that “small is not beautiful”. Specifically, after indicating
a policy paradox regarding the limited financial support that Greek small businesses received or
expected to receive despite their vital importance to the Greek economy, we expose the “structural
impediment” idea. According to the latter the existence of a large share of small business in the
Greek economy is being considered as a structural impediment for economic growth and prosperity.
The implication is a policy dictum that favours a form of an evolutionary natural selection process,
whereby only those establishments successful enough to grow will be able to survive, thus the vast
bulk of the remaining small firms will exit the market.
Citation: Meramveliotakis, Giorgos, Keywords: small business; Greece; growth; COVID-19; sustainable development; SME’s policy
and Manolis Manioudis. 2021.
Sustainable Development, COVID-19
and Small Business in Greece: Small
Is Not Beautiful. Administrative 1. Introduction
Sciences 11: 90. https://doi.org/
Pandemic diseases cause decisive impacts on human societies across economic and
10.3390/admsci11030090
social history. For instance, the Black Death of the Middle Ages and the Spanish Influenza
of 1918 affected economic structures and influenced the social interaction between peo-
Received: 14 July 2021
Accepted: 26 August 2021
ple. More specifically, it has been shown that pandemic diseases alter the dynamics of
Published: 1 September 2021
employment (Cohn 2006; Saavedra 2017) and propel massive economic uncertainty, thus
substantially restrain economic recovery and development (Olmstead and Rhode 2004;
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
Honigsbaum 2020).
with regard to jurisdictional claims in
COVID-19 pandemic consists of a nodal point, a violence interruption of the social
published maps and institutional affil- reproduction and ofthe capital accumulation processes. The structural functions of the
iations. contemporary global economy, i.e., the process of deepening internationalization of capital,
the workings of financialization, the globalization of supply chains and logistics, accelerate
the adverse pathologies and exacerbate the negative consequences of the pandemic (Sell
2020). It is thus not surprising that the coronavirus pandemic is causing an unprecedented
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors.
worldwide economic and social disruption that challenges environmental, social and eco-
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
nomic sustainability (Engler et al. 2021). Pandemic not only seems to seriously threaten the
This article is an open access article
achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Barbier and Burgess 2020;
distributed under the terms and Hörisch 2021) but even calls for an urgent reconceptualization of the term, by considering
conditions of the Creative Commons including human health as an additional sustainability development goal (Hakovirta and
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// Denuwara 2020).
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ Even though advances in vaccinations show a way-out, the short-term outlook remains
4.0/). at least uncertain. Global output declined by 3.4% in 2020 (OECD 2021). According to the
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci11030090 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/admsci
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 2 of 15
most optimistic estimations, economic growth is expected to rebound by 5.6% in 2021 (IMF
2021), however, any set of projections for output and employment is stigmatized from high
uncertainty (World Bank 2021).1 On the other hand, given the worst-case scenario, there is
an apparent likelihood of a cyclical pattern of new cases, where periods of relaxation in
constraints are to be followed by the reinstatement of stricter isolation measures (Bougheas
2020).
Within this context, the involvement of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
for the achievement of sustainable development is of paramount importance. Given the
World World Bank’s (2020) latest estimations, SMEs represent about 90% of businesses and
more than 50% of employment worldwide, while in the European Union, SMEs are making
up 99.8% of all enterprises and two-thirds of employment (European Commission 2019a).
These numbers explicitly reveal that the realization of sustainability cannot be conceivable
without taking into account the role of SMEs.
On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic represents an external shock of unprece-
dented magnitude for the SMEs, by causing substantial reduction to their revenues and
profits and by engendering the very existence of a large portion of them. For instance,
survey data from May 2020 suggest that 41% of UK SMEs had stopped operations and 35%
feared they would be unable to reopen again (FSB 2020). Pedauga et al. (2021) estimate
an overall 43% decline in the number of SMEs operated in Spain. In a similar vein, Díez
et al. (2021) estimate that the proportion of insolvent small and medium-sized enterprises
(i.e., SMEs with negative equity) may rise by six percentage points over 2020–2021, with
lower figures in Asia and higher ones in Southern Europe. Based on empirical surveys,
in a variety of countries, McKinsey (2020) indicates that between 25% and 36% of small
businesses could close down permanently from the disruption in the first four months of
the pandemic. In addition to the short-run immediate effect, which is caused by the severe
restriction measures of social distancing taken up by governments, longer-term challenges
should also be considered for the SMEs. In this vein, Juergensen et al. (2020) record a list of
medium and long-term effects stemming from the upgrade in digital infrastructure to the
reorganization of the supply chains.
However, crisis’ consequences seem to be different among nations and sectors. Thus,
economic recoveries are divergent across countries and sectors, to the extent that each
country may face district pandemic-induced disruptions and diverse levels of policy
support (IMF 2021). As such, the COVID-19 pandemic may propel the uneven development
among nations expanding the gap between North and South. This uneven development
may cause a diversity of inequalities, with one of them reflecting the dualism between large
and small enterprises. Indicatively, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the process
of firms’ digital transformations, mostly by the sharp expansion of e-commerce during
lockdowns. Even though SMEs increasingly use the internet for a variety of commercial and
production-related purposes, on average they fall short in realizing the full potentials of
electronic commerce relative to larger firms. The latter took advantage of their omnichannel
and absorbed the largest part of the effective demand during periods of severe restrictions
in social mobility, thus widening the gap between small and large businesses (UNSTAD
2021).
Our attempt is to show that contrary to the common parlance and to the widespread
belief that treats small business as “the backbone of the economy”, in the sense of being
the primer means of wealth and prosperity, therefore the underlying logic is what is good
for small business will also help government achieves overall economic policy goals, the
prevailing dominant idea that formulates and drives the Greek economic policy is quite
the opposite. Based on textual analysis, from Greece’s structural adjustment programs, to
the various assessment reports, till the latest “Development Plan for the Greek Economy”
conducted from “Pissarides’ Committee Report” on behalf of the Greek government,
we attempt to reveal that the prevailing idea that penetrates the abovementioned texts
is that “small is not beautiful”.2 Specifically, the “structural impediment” idea, which
denotes that the existence of a large share of small business in the Greek economy causes
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 3 of 15
fundamental distortions, thus it constitutes a structural impediment for the economic
growth and prosperity is the dominant idea that we excavate from the aforementioned
texts. What inevitably follows from this idea, as being primarily recorded in Pissarides’
Committee Report, is a policy dictum for small firms to grow. This dictum favours a form
of an evolutionary natural selection process, whereby only those establishments successful
enough to grow will be able to survive, thus the bulk of remaining small firms will vanish.
This process generates “creative destruction” dynamics, triggers a structural transformation
of the Greek economy that ultimately leads to greater industry concentration at the expense
of small businesses. To our view, the considerable reduction of the large share of small
business considers being a rather implicit (not stated explicitly) sine qua non for Greece’s
economic growth.
In what follows, we first attempt to verify on empirical grounds a current policy
paradox. Even though small businesses in Greece (including micro as well as small firms)
consist the 99.3% of all establishments in the country, the largest share within the EU area,
they currently enjoy the lowest national policy support among their European counterparts
during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the same antinomy can also be discerned
in the Greek Government (2021), which is considered to offer a long-run roadmap for the
country’s development. The actual immediate financial policy measures that the “plan”
prescribes for small businesses are only restricted to 375 million Euros for their necessary
“Digital Transformation”, consisting of approximately a grant of 457 Euros on average! In
the subsequent section, we attempt to resolve this paradox by revealing the very idea on
which it resides. Through textual analysis, the dominant “structural impediment” idea is
uncovered and explicated. Our intention is not to defend or criticize this idea, but rather
we try to excavate it from various policy documents and reports, that have been in public
circulation since 2010 at the latest, unpack its meaning, explore its nuances and highlight
the repercussions that entail. We believe it is important, to explore this idea within its own
frame of reference.
2. Greece and SMEs: Between the Scylla of Previous Financial Crisis and the
Charybdis of COVID-19
In Greece, historically, SMEs constitute the entrepreneurial backbone of the country’s
economy (Dimanopoulos et al. 2020). However, what is even more important is that the
vast majority of SMEs are micro enterprises, serving mainly local markets and for the
most part struggling to stay competitive. According to the SBA Fact Sheet (European
Commission 2019b), small businesses in Greece, including both the micro and the small
enterprises, account for an extremely large proportion of 99.7% over the total number of
establishments in the country. Their vital role in the Greek economy is further enhanced
by their considerable contribution to employment creation. Small business accounts
for more than 65% of total employment, indicating that they are responsible for more
employment than the medium or large firms or employment in the public sector. This fact
documents the historical, social and cultural dimension of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in
Greece, which is seated on micro (mainly) and small (secondarily) enterprises. Even more
remarkable is the fact that the large share of small businesses remained prominent, even
after Greece’s severe sovereign debt crisis and prolonged austerity measures have been
implemented during the period 2010–2018. Specifically, during the implementation of the
3 Structural Adjustment Programmes in that period, small business was called to confront
high tax obligations, limited liquidity and low effective demand. It seems that the previous
financial meltdown did not manage to alter the historically embedded characteristic of
the considerable large share of small businesses in the Greek economy, they remain the
cornerstone of the Greek economy, as the table below (Table 1) indicates.
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 4 of 15
Table 1. Enterprises/Class size, 2019.
Number of Enterprises Number of Persons Employed Value-Added
Class Size Greece EU-28 Greece EU-28 Greece EU-28
Number Share Share Number Share Share Billion € Share Share
Micro 800.075 97.4% 93.0% 1.527.075 62.0% 29.7% 9.0 17.6% 20.8%
Small 18.958 2.3% 5.9% 398.514 16.2% 20.1% 11.8 23.1% 17.6%
Medium Sized 2.176 0.3% 0,9% 239.627 9.7% 16.8% 11.7 22.9% 18.0%
SMEs 821.209 100.0% <100% 2.165.216 87.9% 66.6% 32.6 63.5% 56.4%
Large 331 0.0% >0% 297.411 12.1% 33.4% 18.7 36.5% 43.6%
Total 821.540 100.0% 100.0% 2.462.627 100.0% 100.0% 51.2 100.0% 100.0%
Source: SBA Fact Sheet Greece 2019.
The large share of small businesses, especially micro enterprises, in the Greek economy
is additionally confirmed using sectoral analysis data. Micro-enterprises are of critical
importance, accounting for well over 85% in all sectors as Table 2 indicates.
Table 2. Distribution of micro-enterprises/sector (2018).
Sectors Number of Enterprises Micro Enterprises 0–9 Employees Micro %
Professional, Scientific and
135.562 133.870 98.8%
Technical Activities
Industry 57.171 51.854 90.7%
Electricity, Gas, Steam
7.244 7.158 98.8%
Production and Distribution
Water Supply and Recycling 1.956 1.692 86.5%
Constructions 59.843 57.898 96.7%
Wholesale, Retail Trade and
227.682 219.488 96.4%
Repair
Transport and Storage 59.764 57.966 97.0%
Hotel, Restaurant and
107.764 93.230 86.5%
Catering Services
Media and Communications 16.605 15.650 94.2%
Real Estate, Renting and
8.497 8.210 96.6%
Leasing
Total 709.696 672.765 94.8%
Source: ELSTAT/Authors’ estimations.
Before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Greek economy had experienced a
fairly constant recovery, had been expanding for over three years (2016–2019) at just below
2% average annual growth (OECD 2020a). The economy’s recovery was tightly associated
with tourism’s growth, since tourism is one of the most important sectors of the Greek
economy and a key pillar of economic growth. According to the Bank of Greece (2021),
tourism revenues increased by 37.6% during the period 2016–2019 (from 13.2 billion Euros
in 2016 to 18.1 billion Euros in 2019) illustrating tourism’s decisive role in Greek’s economic
comeback. Unfortunately, the pandemic outbreaks heavily hit the Greek tourism industry,
with subsequent challenges to the economy’s activity. Exempli gratia, according to the
Bank of Greece, in 2020 tourism revenues decreased by −76.2% compared to 2019 (from
18.1 billion Euros in 2020 to 4.3 billion Euros in 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic presented
a shock that has come to both the supply and the demand side of the economy, brought
about a series of repercussions that affected both firms and employees. More specifically,
according to Table 3, circa500.000 jobs were suspended due to the Great Lockdown, as the
IMF (2020) called it.
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 5 of 15
Table 3. Lost working hours due to lockdowns (Greece 2020).
Lost Jobs (in Thousand People) Lost Jobs/Workforce
492.9 10.7%
Source: International Labour Organisation (ILO 2020)/ELSTAT.
With the coronavirus crisis escalating, various EU countries have been prompting
economic policy measures for supporting and enhancing SMEs, as part of their efforts to
mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic on the production process and employment
(OECD 2020b). In addition to national initiatives, policy measures have been taken at the in-
ternational level, by the European Investment Bank, the International Finance Corporation
and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), mainly focusing to
provide public support funding to SMEs during the economic meltdown. Last but not least,
European Institutions have provided economic support to national governments, through
various fiscal and monetary programs, including the Commission’s SURE instrument, the
EIB’s European Guarantee Fund (EGF), the ESM’s Pandemic crisis support (PCS), the EU’s
recovery and resilience facility (RRF) and in particular the Next Generation EU package.
From the perspective of SMEs, all these EUs’ policy measures aim, among other things, to
support SMEs’ survival and recovery and minimize negative side effects.
Governments across the Euro Area responded with fiscal measures as an attempt to
address each side of the economic shock. The overall fiscal response at the national level
could be specified and distinguished into three broad categories of measures:
Fiscal impulse: This category includes government spending (i.e., funds to keeping
people’s employment, subsidies to SMEs and self-employers, etc.)
Deferrals: This category includes the deferral of certain payments such as taxes, VAT
and social security contributions, which have to be paid later to support the liquidity
position of firms.
Liquidity and guarantees: This category includes export guarantees, liquidity assis-
tance and credit lines through national development banks.
Therefore, without the state’s fiscal measures the majority of firms would have been
in an extremely difficult position to meet their financial obligations to suppliers, creditors
and the state. The table below (Table 4) compiles a detailed comparison of the totality of
measures adopted by the largest six European countries plus Belgium, Demark and Greece.
Table 4. Fiscal Measures adopted to confront COVID-19 (% GDP 2019).
Country Fiscal Impulse Deferral Other Liquidity/Guarantee
Belgium 1.4% 4.8% 21.9%
Denmark 5.5% 7.2% 4.1%
France 5.1% 8.7% 14.2%
Germany 8.3% 7.3% 24.3%
Italy 3.4% 13.2% 32.1%
Netherlands 3.7% 7.9% 3.4%
Spain 4.3% 0.4% 12.2%
United Kingdom 8.3% 2% 15.4%
Greece 3.1% 1.2% 2.1%
https://www.bruegel.org/publications/datasets/covid-national-dataset/?fbclid=IwAR2vhrmRYfYaqVGgG7
2hGqSiCQ5AnuZl85HctDYs22KF_gd_IQqhxKhp-mg#greece (accessed on 24 November 2020).
The largest amount of immediate fiscal emergency measures (i.e., fiscal impulse
measures) are taken in Germany as well as in the United Kingdom, amount to 8.3% of their
GDP, respectively. On the other hand, in Greece the emergency measures are restricted to
3.1% of GDP, being the second lowest among the countries under comparison. Regarding
the deferral measures, Italy’s response is large by historical standards, at 13.2% of its GDP.
Greece’s related response is far below (1.2%), consisting once again the second lowest. As
far as the other liquidity and guarantee measures are concerned, Italy accounts for the
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 6 of 15
largest proportion in this category, followed by Germany and Belgium. Greece is ranked at
the bottom in this category.
Undoubtedly, there is fairly valid evidence that national governments’ financial mea-
sures tend to diverge on favoring different categories of measures. This, also, explains
the great volatility in countries’ ranking between these three categories. For instance, the
United Kingdom while ranked in the first place in two categories is falling in one of the
lowest positions in the third. To a far lesser extent, this trend is uniform across the countries
included in the table, except one. Being by far the country with the lowest total sum of
measures, Greece is constantly ranked at the lowest positions in all three categories.3
Furthermore, the introduced liquidity schemes (being by a definition of extreme im-
portance given the severe liquidity problems faced by the vast majority of small businesses
during the pandemic) besides being extremely low (actually the lowest among European
counterparts), are also addressed (chiefly) on larger enterprises (i.e., shopping malls, hotels,
etc.), since from these schemes are excluded the self-employers and a great number of
micro firms and associations.
Thus, although various short-term emergent measures have been taken in Greece to
mitigate the pandemic’s negative effects for small businesses, nevertheless the magnitude
of these policies, measured as the share of GDP, is the smallest one between European
countries. However, here a contradiction emerges in a form of paradox. While in Greece,
small business has the largest share in total establishments within the EU economies,
nevertheless the magnitude of the supporting policy measures they enjoy is the lowest one.
Despite their vital importance to the Greek economy (as being 99.7% of the total number of
enterprises) small businesses appeared not to have adequate to their importance policy
support during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unfortunately, this paradox, in the sense of the limited national policy support, does
not characterize only the country’s short-term recovery policy, but it could also be discerned
in the long-term country’s economic policy as well. Specifically, under the EUs’ “Next
Generation” program, the Greek government conducted the Greek Government (2021),
which is considered to offer a roadmap not only for the post-COVID-19 era but also for
the third decade of the 21st century. The plan includes 170 specific projects, investments
and reforms, and features four pillars: the digital transition for the state, businesses and
citizens, employment growth and increased social cohesion. Given the magnitude and the
strategic importance of the “plan” for the Greek economy’s future, we are surprised by
the fact that the actual immediate fiscal policy measures that the “plan” prescribes for the
small business are exclusively restricted to 375 million Euros for their necessary “Digital
Transformation”, consisting approximately a considerably limited grant of 457 Euros on
average! It is thus this disparity between rhetoric (i.e., small business consists of the
“backbone of the economy”) and reality (i.e., the actual economic policy) that represents a
paradox.
We do not attempt here to identify and analyze all the possible reasons vested behind
that paradox. We simply attempt to reveal and highlight the inner logic of this paradox
to rationalize it. In other words, we aim to detect and uncover the very idea in which
this paradox resides in, hence providing a solution to it, in the sense that gratifies us by
dissipating the very sense of this paradox.
3. Small Is Not Beautiful
3.1. From Some Preliminary Theoretical Considerations . . .
COVID-19 pandemic is dialectically related to the health systems’ crises, the economic
crisis, the public policy and individual behavior (Bratianu 2020). Being a multifaced
phenomenon, COVID-19 substantially challenges the business sector’s modus operandi.
This brings to the fore, the question whereas a new business model primarily based on
digitalization is already in place and prone to sustain, or a return to the previous business
model after the end of the pandemic is more likely to happen (Seetharaman 2020). Moreover,
the actual actions that firms undertake during the pandemic crisis could be classified into
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 7 of 15
two broad categories. The first category includes actions that aim to simply comply with
government measures, while the second category entails actions that supplementary focus
on their development (Zi˛eba 2021).
Even though the existence of a voluminous literature that stresses and highlights the
importance of SMEs in contributing to job creation and output growth (see inter alia Schu-
macher 1973; Acs 1999; Beck et al. 2005; Tung and Zeynep 2008; Ayandibu and Houghton
2017), a different logic could be discerned in various policy documents and reports for the
Greek economy, that formulates and shapes what we may call as the “structural impend-
ing” idea. According to this idea, small businesses are considered, due to their inherent
limitations, to be structural impediments to economic growth and prosperity. The argu-
mentation is that the large share of small business in Greece is recognized as the main
cause of the economy’s specific fundamental weaknesses—low economy’s competitiveness,
hysteresis in R&D expenditures and innovation, structural reforms deficiencies, failures in
creating an export-oriented economy—that do not generate economic recovery and growth.
Inevitably, this line of thought results in an uncomfortable corollary when it is pushed to
its limits: If the large share of small business hinders the economy’s recovery and growth,
then policy actions that aim to reduce the total number of small companies should be
placed at the core of economic policy. This, in turn, means policies friendly for large-scale
entrepreneurship and FDI. This insight is analytically substantial and has many crucial
implications for the country’s developmental policy. The overall discussion is constructed
around a binary opposition between small vs. big business and the economic development
is judged through this prism, with crisis marking an oscillation in favor of the one pole.
Thus, as we are going to indicate, the underlying logic that formulates and drives
small business’ policy in Greece is the idea that the large share of small business causes
fundamental distortions that hinders the economy’s growth and prosperity. This logic
penetrates the analysis exposed in significant policy documents and reports unleashed
from international organizations, think-tanks and Greek government’s committees, which
have been in public circulation since 2010 at the latest, is quite the opposite. From the
texts of Greece’s structural adjustment programs to the various assessment reports, till the
latest “Development Plan for the Greek Economy” conducted from “Pissarides’ Committee
Report” on behalf of the Greek government, the prevailing idea is that the large share of
small business constitutes a fundamental distortion, a structural impediment for economic
growth and prosperity. This consists of a rather common insight within the various policy
documents and reports, a shared common understating regarding the actual role of small
firms for the country’s economy and development. Before embarking on a textual analysis
of the abovementioned policy document and reports, some theoretical preliminary issues
regarding the role of big business in economic growth are considered and discussed.
In economic theory, the monumental contributions of Schumpeter (1934, 1942), Chan-
dler (1959, 1977, 1990) and Williamson (1975, 1980) offer the fundamental bedrocks of the
idea that the actual trajectory of economic growth and prosperity is mainly determined
by large firms, or to put it in other words, a pronounced shortage of big business and
competitive firms is a deficiency that impedes and restrains economic progress. First, it
was Schumpeter (1934, 1942) who by identifying innovation as the motor of economic de-
velopment, formulated a size-innovation argumentation. Big businesses are more capable
to implement processes that drive innovation, consequently spurring economic growth.
Chandler (1959, 1977, 1990) used the economies of scale and scope rationale to explain the
significant contribution of large companies in the capitalist expansion of US and Germany’s
economies during the 19th and early 20th centuries. On the other hand, Williamson (1975,
1980) explained the formation of big business in terms of transaction cost minimization,
thus described the former as organizations that facilitate low transaction costs, therefore
boost economic growth.
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 8 of 15
Yet even in the neoclassical theory of growth as being exemplified in the pioneer
models of Solow (1956), Romer (1986) and Lucas (1993), the accumulation of physical
capital, the accumulation of technology-innovation and the accumulation of knowledge,
that consist of the three main determinants of economic growth, can only be realized
with the involvement of large enterprises. In other words, the efficacy of these models is
seriously challenged if we do not assume a large share of big companies being in existence.
Following from the aforementioned, numerous contemporary studies have gone to
recognize the role of big businesses in economic growth and development by showing
their importance for the emerging economies (Pack and Westphal 1986), by stressing their
ability to promote R&D (Pagano and Schivardi 2003), by highlighting their economies
of scale and scope (Buckley 2004) by pinpointing their competence for export-oriented
production (Hiratsuka 2006; Sanidas 2007), by underlying their capacity to organize and
manage more efficiently inventories and value chains (Iacoviello et al. 2011) to name but
a few. A telling example of this trend is the current World Bank’s policy prescription
for the creation of large firms, especially in developing economies. Ciani et al. (2020)
conduct a study on the behalf of World Bank (2020) under the characteristic title “Making
it Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms”. The rationale is that since
high-performing economies tend to have a larger share of bigger enterprises than the
low-and middle-income countries, the latter should enable more firms to make it big, the
governments should support the creation of new, large firms through private investments
by opening markets to competition.
3.2. . . . To the Greek Case
The inevitable conclusion drawn from the abovementioned is that the progress to-
wards growth and development presupposes and evolves a process of structural trans-
formation, whereas the share of big business should be increased at the expense of small
business. This is exactly the logic that pervades and dominates the Greek case. From 2010
and onwards, from the “First Structural Adjustment Program” to the release of the so-called
“Pissarides’ Committee Report” in 2020, the fundamental belief, albeit not expressed explic-
itly and loudly, is that the large share of small companies in the Greek economy constitutes
a structural impediment for growth and development, therefore a sound developmental
policy should be friendly to large-firm creation, even if this policy entails an ala Schumpeter
“creative destruction” of the smallest ones. We should prefer to clarify that we use textual
analysis in the sense of cite several specific pieces of textual evidence to support analysis
of what the various texts say explicitly, as well as inferences drawn from the text. In this
vein, we quote any argumentation relating to small businesses and their role in Greece’s
economic development that appear in the selected texts.
From 2010 to 2018, economic policy in Greece was largely dictated and determined
by the 3 structural adjustment programs (European Commission 2010, 2012, 2015). The
programs aimed to develop a new “regime of accumulation”, whereas privatization, dereg-
ulation, flexibilization of the labor market were the most essential features of these pro-
grams. In this vein, a structural adjustment program should not be conceived merely as
an economic program that implies restructures to large segments of the economy, but as
a mechanism of social reproduction that transforms social relations within a capitalist
social formation. Within this broader context, various economic policies are specified and
indicated for economic reforms that according to the program intended to restore and
enhance the economy’s performance.
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 9 of 15
Contrary to what one might expect given the essential importance of small business,
as being the “backbone” of the Greek economy, the former is mentioned only once in the
3 structural adjustment programs, over 500-word long-length overall text! The fact that
the notion of small firms appears only once in the 3 programs is in itself an intriguing
issue, may be taken as an indication that small businesses are not regarded as quite as
fundamental as it might be commonly believed. However, this does not necessarily imply
that there is not an apparent and underlying perception, as it might be derived from the
following excerpt placed in the first structural adjustment program:
“Lastly, most R&D and innovation indicators point to Greece having a gap in
this area. This is shown in the relatively low gross domestic expenditure on R&D
as a percentage of GDP, reflecting the sectoral specialization of the economy in
services, the high share of small firms and the low representation of high tech firms
in overall production”. (European Commission 2010, p. 26, italics added)
Thus, the only appearance of small businesses within the 3 structural adjustment
programs is associated with the consideration that they consist one of the causes of lower
R&D expenditures in the Greek economy. Nowhere there is at least an additional reference,
let alone any acknowledgment of being the “backbones of the economy”. The above excerpt
could be considered as the root for the formation of the “structural impediment” idea.
Following the 3 structural adjustment programs, the “structural impediment” idea
starts to be enriched and fully shaped within a phalanx of texts from international insti-
tutions and think-tanks. To single out just some cases among innumerable such assess-
ments, we start with the European Commission’s (2020) “Enhanced Surveillance Report”,
conducted in the context of the Post-Programme Monitoring Framework on the eve of
Novembers’ resurgence of the pandemic:
“ . . . the Greek economy is still expected to suffer one of the largest falls in
economic activity in the EU, on account of its high exposure to tourism and the
large share of small enterprises, which have a limited adjustment capacity”. (p. 14,
italics added)
At this time, the large share of small firms besides being accused of the limited
recorded R&D expenditures, it now gains credentials by considering to be a broader
structural distortion that hinders the economy’s recovery.
The idea that the large share of small companies constitutes a structural impediment
for recovery and consequently for economic growth is re-affirmed by the European Stability
Mechanism (ESM 2020), who boldly put it in this way:
“ . . . the main factors that curbed the overall effectiveness of structural reforms
were: the limited administrative capacity in the case of Greece, the lack of political
and societal reform collaboration, the lack of clear focus, the low euro area
inflation during the Greek programs; the hindered competitiveness from high
taxation, and a large number of small- and medium-sized enterprises”. (p. 62, emphasis
added)
As it is inferred from the above excerpt, the large share of small businesses is identified
as one of the factors that deter the efficacy of the structural reforms, so much needed the
economy for recovery and growth.
Elsewhere, ESM (ibid) detects that the limited competitiveness and the slow rate of
investments are inner attributes of Greece’s idiosyncratic industrial sector, which of course
is marked by the large share of small business:
“Substantial long-term benefits are limited by Greece’s industrial structure, in-
cluding the prevalence of small- and medium-sized enterprises, only slow com-
petitiveness gains and insufficient investment spending compared to the euro
area average”. (p.98)
Last but not least, for ESM (ibid) the lower than expected increase of exports, after the
implementation of domestic devaluation policy, can be ascribed to the inherent difficulty
of small firms to become considerable exporters:
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 10 of 15
“ . . . the internal devaluation strategy failed to fully capture the impact on
domestic demand given that the country’s production involved small companies
that found it difficult to shift to export markets, although some progress was
made”. (p. 47)
One could find the very same line of reasoning to be reconciled by numerous main-
stream think tanks. For instance, Pagoulatos (2018) conducts an assessment report for
Greece’s bailout programs on behalf of Hellenic Observatory, an established think tank
placed in the London School of Economics. From the outset of his assessment, he lists the
structural impediments and distortions that still bedevil the Greek economy:
“Despite the successive reform programs, the Greek economy continues to suffer
a weak public administration, slow functioning justice system, low savings, high
consumption, small average business size, and a still weak export sector”. (p. ii,
italics added)
To recapitulate, at least from 2010 and onwards, there is an ongoing, expanded belief,
being to some extent a replica of a much older pattern of thinking stemming from the
history of economic ideas, that the large share of small business in Greece, constitutes
a fundamental burden for country’s competitiveness and development. The “structural
impediment” idea summarizes the basic shared, within the dominant policy circles, an
insight that inevitably shapes and formulates policy directives.
However, the most thorough exposition of the “structural impeding” idea can be
discerned in the “Development Plan for the Greek Economy” (Pissarides’ Committee
Report 2020) conducted by a committee chaired by Nobel prize winner in economics
Christopher Pissarides on behalf of the current Greek government. It is crucial to stress
that “Pissarides’ Committee Report” should also be conceived as being the theoretical
and ideological platform, in which the Greek Government (2021) under the E.U.’s “Next
Generation” program is based on.4 Rather than being an additional developmental plan,
“Pissarides’ Committee Report” constitutes the fundamental road map for a holistic growth
strategy for the Greek economy.
Pissarides’ Committee Report (2020) identifies and analyses the structural charac-
teristics and prevailing trends of the Greek economy, the main international trends that
will affect its future course, the general direction in which the economy must move to
achieve medium-term strong growth, the most important obstacles that hinder the growth
trajectory and proposes development policy actions in a broader sense.
Concerning small businesses, the report’s outline is once again the same as before.
Small businesses are seen to be structural impediments that deter and curtail the economy’s
recovery and growth. However, it seems that the committee is not brave enough to push this
idea to its further limits. If (the large share of) small firms constitute an organic deficiency
that departs the economy from the developmental path, then a structural transformation
that aims to reduce the large share of small businesses should be placed at the center of
economic policy and exposed explicitly.
Initially, small firms appear in a section with the characteristic title “Fragmented
low-productivity entrepreneurship” (p. 22). Following a short comment regarding the
large share of small business in the Greek economy in contrast to other E.U countries, it
is stressed that the inner inability of these firms to take advantage of economies of scale,
to develop leading-edge technologies, thus gaining international competitive advantage,
concludes to an uncomfortable result a domestic consumption-oriented economy:
“The high share of employment in single and small enterprises is related to low
labor productivity, as productivity is positively related to the size of enterprises.
The small size of Greek companies does not allow them to take advantage of
economies of scale and cutting-edge technologies. As a result, small business
focuses primarily on providing services for domestic consumption”. (p. 22)
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 11 of 15
The problem is considered to be more serious if it is taken into account the lower
productivity of small companies:
“The problem is exacerbated in Greece by the fact that the productivity of small
businesses in the country is particularly low”. (ibid)
The section concludes with a statement that the existence of a large share of small
business should be attributed to the economy’s rigidities and distortions that prevent small
businesses to grow:
“The small size of Greek companies is a consequence of economy’s ankyloses
that create incentives for companies to remain small and make difficult for them
to grow”. (ibid)
However, Pissarides’ Committee Report neither clarifies nor mention which are these
“economy’s ankyloses” and through which exact mechanisms curtail small business to grow.
Moreover, this statement makes the whole argument circular, since it implies somehow
that economy’s distortions and weaknesses are both the result of the large share of small
business and part of the explanation of its existence. In this way, a paradoxical scheme
emerges where the economy’s structural deficiencies are considered at the same time to
be the cause and effect of the large share of small business, both the explanans and the
explanandum.
Furthermore, the committee detects problems in corporate governance in the func-
tioning of small firms, with their small size being also the cause of the limited free flow of
shares and the subsequent low ability of a small business to raise finance for investments:
“Problems with corporate governance are potentially more serious for small and
family businesses. This is because the key shareholders in these companies often
have close relationships with management. Also, the size of investment by new
shareholders in these companies is necessarily low: in small companies due to
size and in family companies the percentage of shares available to the public (free
float) is low”. (p. 126)
Moreover, according to the report, it is eventually the small firms than the larger
counterparts that tend more frequently to operate within the so-called economy’s grey
area (i.e., within the boundaries of the informal economy that closely relates with the black
economy).
“ . . . businesses in the grey area of the economy do not grow, do not systematically
invest in new technologies and they do not focus on exports because their goal is
to maintain a low profile. The initial structure of these businesses is small family
firms”. (p. 147)
Towards the end of the report, there is one paragraph that compromises and signifies
the Committees’ underlying policy proposal regarding the future of small business in the
Greek economy. For the report, the country’s recovery and long-term growth could be
assured through the systematic growth of small businesses:
“For the Greek economy, the goal of empowering SMEs is fully compatible
with the need for systematic growth of all businesses, small, medium and large.
This is because business empowerment stems largely from its larger size, which
improves its cost and financing terms. The broader measures policies outlined in
the report will make a decisive contribution in this direction”. (p. 227)
As it is inferred from the above excerpt, the economy’s recovery and growth presup-
pose the existence of a share of large firms capable of utilizing and exploiting economies of
scale and scope. Thus, Pissarides’ Committee Report addresses a pathway to economic
development, whereby the process of economic growth is driven by and through large
firms. The implication is that such a process presupposes a structural transformation of the
Greek economy regarding the distribution of small businesses. In other words, the large
share of small firms has to be reduced, thus a different process of industrial concentration
should be actualized since the function of the former presupposes the existence of the latter.
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 12 of 15
So, it logically follows that a vast balk of small business will exi the market, since only
those establishments successful enough to grow will manage to survive.
4. In Place of Conclusions
Starting from 2010, the year that signifies the nodal point at which historical ten-
dency reveals its present and shapes the future for the Greek economy, we have attempted,
through textual analysis, to reveal the so-called “structural impediment” idea. SMEs and
particularly the large share of small firms, which constitutes 99.7% of Greek entrepreneur-
ship, are seen to be a structural impediment for economic recovery and growth. In contrast
with most contemporary scholars of SMEs, who champion a “backbone of the economy”
argumentation, the underlying prevailing (albeit not explicitly stated) policy trend for the
Greek economy aims to promote a structural transformation of inter-firm relations, via an
evolutionary-policy-driven firms’ growth. When such a process takes place, a shakeout
follows. Inevitably, the large share of small businesses is considerably reduced and a higher
degree of industry concentration takes place.
To sum up, although our intention was not to defend or to criticize the “structural
impediment” idea, we strongly support that such a discussion should not be confined
exclusively to the (albeit vast, mostly empirical) literature of the pros and cons of SMEs
vs. larger firms, since this literature ignores the inner, fundamental transformations that a
crisis, as a defining historical moment, brings to the fore. Has the crisis marked a turning
point in the organization of the economy? For instance, according to Audretsch and Thurik
(2001) and Thurik et al. (2013) a major shift marked contemporary capitalism from the
’90s onwards, a shift from the so-called managed economy to the so-called entrepreneurial
economy. The former was based on the widespread belief that economic growth could
be assured mainly through the functioning of the large firms, while the entrepreneurial
economy places great importance on technology, innovation and joint-ventures and stresses
the changing and growing role of entrepreneurship and small firms as drivers of growth.
However, Thurik et al. (2013) clarify that a proper policy response should not be merely
exhausted to policy measures that promote new and small firms but to encompass a broader
re-consideration for a public policy that fosters and facilitates the overall entrepreneurial
economy. It is our belief that the situation of the present day, marked by the fact that the
contemporary developmental problems intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the
economic depression, calls for a transcendence from the level of the analysis of the various
forms and models of capitalism to the deeper level of the analysis of the structural elements
of the capitalist system as such, irrespective of its specific forms of historical appearance or
level of development. By abstracting the particular forms of appearance, we can identify
and explain the inner, fundamental causes that a crisis entails to the reorganization of the
economy. Thus, a return to the basic questions, problems and conceptions of the classical
political economy and specifically to the critique of political economy from Karl Marx is
proposed. Here our aim is only to make a concluding reference to the theoretical context
in which the relevant discussion should be placed After all, we argue that the “structural
impeding” idea should not be attributed to the workings of an economy’s specificities but
rather viewed as a policy response to the fundamental functioning of capitalism being in a
financial crisis.
Within the Marxist analytical framework, small business, besides being merely a
quantifiable notion (defined exclusively on the number of employed persons), acquires
qualitative characteristics, becomes a social class category, since it is considered that the
owners of the small firms belong to the petty bourgeoisie class. The latter is placed between
the two dominant classes of capitalism, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and includes
self-employed, autonomous producers and owners of means of production, who employ a
limited number of wage workers, however and in contrast with the haute bourgeoisie, these
owners are also obliged to work alongside their employees, for their social reproduction.
From this background, it is possible to identify a linkage between class relations, crisis
and the “structural impediment” idea. The capitalist crisis is conceptualized in terms of
Adm. Sci. 2021, 11, 90 13 of 15
over-accumulation of capital that leads to lower profitability. At a certain point, sufficient
capital has to be destroyed for the economy to exit the crisis, a creative destruction of
the existing capitalist order has to be in place that eventually restores the conditions for
profitability. In this context, the idea of “structural impediment” stresses the need for
the creative destruction of the weakest and less efficient fractions of capital which are the
small firms. To put this differently, for the Marxist side of the story, this idea represents the
neoclassical formula for reboot profitability in the Greek economy, via the destruction of the
weakest fractions of capital. In this vein, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis serves as a period
of concentration and centralization of capital, by creating the political and economic context
in which the policy that fosters and facilitates the destruction of the weakest fractions of
capital is legitimized and rationalized as a necessity.
Author Contributions: Conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, inves-
tigation, resources, data curation, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing,
visualization, supervision, project administration: G.M. and M.M. All authors have read and agreed
to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This research was funded by the Neapolis University Pafos.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Notes
1 For instance, Gita Gopinath, the IMF’s chief economist, pointed out that the crisis could knock 9 trillion dollars of global GDP
over the next two years. However, nobody knows exactly how long the health crisis will last. Its length is a critical fact in making
any projection (IMF 2020).
2 This expression consists a variation of Schumacher’s (1973) classic book “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People
Mattered”.
3 Specifically, these measures are distinguished into the following: (a) the immediate fiscal impulse amounts to 5.9 billion Euros,
including 2.36 billion Euros financial support for employees with suspended labour contracts (27% of total employees), self-
employers, and individual businesses affected by COVID-19. In addition, 0.8 billion Euros were transferred to cover the interest
on loan installments of SMEs, (b) deferrals amount to 2.3 billion Euros, including 1.03 billion Euros in suspension in VAT
payments for enterprises and self-employed workers, 0.5 billion Euros suspension of other tax obligations for enterprise and
self-employed workers, 0.8 billion suspensions of social security payments and installments for firms and (c) liquidity and
guarantee measures including 4 billion Euros to support firms affected by the COVID-19 crisis. More specifically these measures
include a 2 billion Euros financing scheme to provide repayable direct financial support to active SMEs affected by the COVID-19
pandemic and a 2 billion Euros guarantee scheme issued by the Hellenic Development Bank (HDB) to support the provision of
working capital loans to businesses independently of size.
4 Actually, one can find numerous passages from Pissarides’ Committee Report duplicating in the Greek Government (2021).
Similarly, excerpts that represent the “structural impediment” idea in the “report” are equally reproduced into the “plan”.
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