Resort development
To lovers of Greece, it's a mystery why this island idyll isn't a retirement destination on the scale of Spain or Portugal. By rights, Greece should be the Florida of Europe. Once again, it's rigid laws that suffocate the market. In Greece, areas outside of cities do not have zoning laws. That doesn't mean you can build freely on islands or in rural areas. On the contrary, development is severely restricted. Only a single law allows for master plan development, and it requires that the villas and homes be constructed around a major hotel.
The law also prevents the developer from selling homes or villas; only rentals are allowed. For example, golf course developments are effectively barred. Incredibly, the entire country offers only a half-a-dozen courses.
A new law provides two improvements. First, it reduces the requirement of two environmental impact statements to just one, virtually cutting the approval time in half, from two years to a bit over twelve months. Second, it now allows developers to sell many of the apartments and homes in their resorts, instead of merely renting them out. That change alone could make Greece a prime destination for retirees.
But the measure still doesn't go far enough. Developers are pushing for more reforms. "The laws should change to allow development around golf courses and marinas without necessarily building more hotels," says Miltos Kambourides, managing partner of Dolphin Capital, an international luxury resort developer with several projects in Greece. If the thaw continues, it will stir an industry with giant potential.
The labor market
The labor measures enacted this month are the most important reforms of all. In the past, nothing hampered Greece's competitiveness more severely than its multi-tiered system for setting wages. Until recently, the government and the unions negotiated a new "minimum wage" annually, mandating that the lowest-paid employees get a raise of, say, 5%.
In practice, the deal didn't apply to just the bottom level. It set a floor on wages for workers in all industries, up and down the pay scale. Then, a second round of negotiations would occur for each industry, with the 5% national agreement as a minimum raise. So the department store employees might get an extra 2%. Only then would the individual companies engage their unions. Those company-wide agreements would add another couple of points. So raises in the prosperous 2000 to 2008 years could easily come to 9% or 10% annually.
The three-level system guaranteed that pay rose faster than inflation. That caused Greek goods to become more overpriced, year after year, than competing products from Germany, which held wages in check. If one factor is responsible for the disaster in the eurozone, it's the rigid wage policies not just in Greece, but the extremely similar systems in Italy, Spain and Portugal.
