Although the official number of Greek emigrants increased threefold between 2009 and 2012, from about 40 000 to more than 120 000, remittances evolved in a counterintuitive way. Contrary to theory , remittances to Greece appear not to be countercyclical. Since the country experienced the first effects of the 2008-global financial crisis in 2009, remittances have started to decrease while the main macroeconomic and social indicators of Greece worsened. To understand this phenomenon, I built a statistical model to analyse the impacts of the quality and the level of confidence in the political and institutional systems – that have been strongly affected by the crisis – and the impact of the level of education of new emigrants on remittances inflows. This statistical test has been supplemented by a comparative analysis with other South-European countries that have also been hard-hit by the crisis.
The recent surveys conducted by Gropas and Triandafyllidou (2014) and by Labrianidis and Pratsinakis (2016) provided interesting insights into the factors that pushed Greeks to emigrate and about their sociologic, economic and demographic profile. However, the link between those insights and the remitting behaviour of Greek emigrants has not been clearly established.
