The post's title of course does not refer
to comments from various finance ministers, central bank officials etc. It refers
to one certain feature that the Greek economy has displayed since the
adjustment program was commenced in mid-2010.
The said feature is none other than exports’
contribution to growth as opposed to the other two EZ countries who are
currently en train of a similar troika-led adjustment program, namely Ireland
and Portugal (I exclude Cyprus for obvious reasons).
I have plotted a few charts showing annual
changes of GDP components in constant prices, as a way to replicate GDP growth
contributions in an admittedly rather facile way.
 |
| source: Eurostat, own calculations |
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| source: Eurostat, own calculations |
 |
| source: Eurostat, own calculations |
The plain and rather painful takeaway from the
charts is that except from Greece the other two countries have displayed some (or more than some in Ireland's case)
positive exports’ contribution.
Greece only witnessed a positive exports
contribution in 2010, after the great 2009 trade collapse, which was nothing other
than the base effect kicking in. The exact opposite goes for Portugal and
Ireland where exports were positive for all three years since 2009.
A while back I had penned a post claiming thatthe evolution of the troika-led adjustments could be predicted via two rathersimple indicators, the % that household demand and exports account for relative
to GDP.
Here are the indicators mentioned above for the
aforementioned countries.
 |
| source: Eurostat |
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| source: Eurostat |
My rationale was again rather simple. The
higher the share of households’ final consumption in GDP the higher the hit the
country’s GDP could take, while the higher the share of exports the bigger the
cushion they could provide.
Unfortunately for Greece, results thus far seem
to confirm this simplistic rule to a t...
P.S.
Of course this does not mean that export-led growth is bullet-proof. A
look at the following chart can confirm this.
 |
| source: Eurostat |
As you can see exports' growth plummeted in 2012 and the variance of growth for certain coutnries was significant.
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