User:Nick Gardner /Sandbox

When Greece joined the Eurozone in 2001, it was less prosperous than the other members, but its GDP grew more rapidly over the next eight years and fell less rapidly in the course of 2009. Its unemployment rate nevertheless rose in line with the European average and it was still suffering higher levels of poverty .

The country's national debt rose by about 25 per cent above its above-average pre-crisis level of 100 per cent of GDP.

Fiscal factors account for only a third of the spreads

s demonstrated in my recent book with Carmen Reinhart This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly , Greece has been in default roughly one out of every two years since it first gained independence in the nineteenth century

in

[1] Robert Chote et al: Britain's Fiscal Squeeze, the Choices Ahead, IFS Briefing Note BN87, September 2009

				2009				2010
	2007	2008	2009	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
GDP (% change on previous period)

Household Debt

(percentage of GDP}

	1997	2007
The United States	68	95
The United Kingdom	75	105
The Eurozone	42	60

(Source: approximate transcription from the Turner Report [2])

The growth of financial assets

(Financial assets as a percentage of GDP)

	1995	2005
The United States	303	405
The United Kingdom	278	359
The Eurozone	180	303

(Source: Martin Wolf: Fixing Global Finance, page 11, Yale University Press, 2009. )