Thursday, March 2: Professor Georgios Anastasiadis, MBA Professor, American College of Thessaloniki

By Lu Ding

This afternoon, two of our groups met with Professor Georgios Anastasiadis, a well-known economist and professor in the MBA Program at the American College of Thessaloniki. From his presentation and the ensuing

discussion, we learned both about the debt crisis and the international relations challenges involved in the migrant crisis.

Professor Anastasiadis provided an in-depth explanation of the factors that led to the debt crisis, which both reaffirmed what we had researched previously and filled in gaps in our understanding. His talk, titled “Greece: Too Small to Fail?” began with the suggestion that from 2002 to 2009, the country’s economic strategy was incompatible with the kind of strategy required by a small open economy like Greece’s. He argued that the political system misused the advantages of Greece joining the Eurozone; for example, being part of the Eurozone increased investor confidence in Greece and provided lower-cost financing, which the public sector used to over-borrow, leading to ballooning domestic demand. Another advantage was that joining the Eurozone could have given Greece access to large markets for products and created of economies of scale; instead, he argued, continuous domestic “economic overheating” generated inward growth.

He then explained that the country was, and in some ways still is, seeking an economic paradigm change, from a model based on domestic demand (driven by financial transactions from abroad) to one focused on Greece’s comparative advantage in sectors that could be competitive globally. Some of these promising sectors included the obvious--tourism and the agricultural industry--but also some less obvious sectors, such as the production and export of pharmaceuticals, metal and construction material industries, and tradable services like cloud computing, big data and business analytics. Professor Anastasiadis, who is deeply involved in investment and stock exchange issues, provided us unique insight into these promising sectors.

After analyzing the debt crisis, we discussed his views on the refugee crisis. With so much to cover, we went over our allotted meeting time, so Professor Anastasiadis--clearly a committed educator--shared with us his presentation, additional slides, data, and articles for us to reference following the meeting. We appreciated the fruitful discussion and will no doubt rely on the information he provided as we write our final reports.