After a long period in the doldrums with austerity measures and consecutive bailouts, Greece still bears the scars of the recent financial adventure while strives to recover in a new economic environment. As one of the hardest-hit by the economic crisis Member states, Greece has seen its economic capacity reduced, the unemployment and poverty levels rising, and the living conditions for a significant part of the population and social groups deteriorating. Despite the plethora of analyses on the political and socio-economic perspectives, the evolution of social vulnerability remains a largely unexplored area that merits further investigation and analysis in a crisis-ridden country of the European South. The paper aims to study how social vulnerability has evolved in Greece from 2008 to 2017 using secondary data and descriptive statistics that focus on five key variables (disposable income, education, employment, gender, urban/rural environment) for a better understanding of the domestic social vulnerability dynamics in a period of stark contrasts. Overall, our findings demonstrate an increased risk of social exclusion and a widening of inequality and poverty rates during the stated period.

In Europe, despite systemic, functional and structural differences, the welfare state has been a key component of the state after World War II. In recent decades, the former has been accused for inflating government spending and turning people into passive recipients of benefits and services. For this reason, and for several more, such as globalization, the transforming nature of employment and the changing family patterns, the welfare state has undergone the necessary reforms in order to combine the effectiveness and efficiency of its services and benefits. The outbreak of 2009 economic crisis has created tremendous problems to the welfare state, especially in the hardest hit countries, such as Greece. Although these structural problems and inefficiencies existed, the Greek state in general and the National Health System (NHS) in particular have handled the coronavirus successfully, making the country an example for the others but also stressing the necessity to consolidate the welfare state and specifically the NHS. This paper aims to analyze the way the Greek state handled the coronavirus crisis while underlie the importance of the welfare state especially in times of crisis and the challenges that coronavirus has created.

Introduction: The study aims to map and analyse the development of social vulnerability patterns in Greece through a perma-crisis context (economic crisis, austerity, covid-19, energy, and inflation crisis) over the period 2008-2022.Methods: The paper rests on the construction of a composite index of four key pillars of social vulnerability (employment, living conditions, health, and education) consisting of 15 selected variables obtained from the official Eurostat datasets and using PCA analysis.Results: Our findings show that social vulnerability patterns in Greece demonstrate a considerable shift during the stated period where certain social groups (i.e., NEETs and precarious workers) seem to suffer the most. The first pattern (2008-2016) is largely characterized by the intensity and severity of the economic crisis and austerity measures, which contributed to the exacerbation of social vulnerability. The second pattern (2017-2022) presents a gradual decline mainly due to the recovery of the economy and a decrease in unemployment rates featuring a strong tendency to reach the pre-crisis levels in the years to come.Discussion: The high levels of social vulnerability leading to social exclusion, poverty, and the widening of inequalities, impede the country’s resilience and recovery efforts and undermine social cohesion.

The spread of the Covid-19 brought global institutions, societies, states and economies in a critical position as they encounter a new worldwide multilevel crisis. At the same time, states have had to handle this crisis acquiring an interventionist role, protecting the social and economic cohesion, providing better health care services for their citizens and investing in scientific research, as a means to restrict this new pandemic. In order to handle that situation and its consequences, the use of all the available resources became necessary as well as the improvement of the cooperation between the private and the public sector. In Greece private sector has shown an unprecedented willingness for Greece’s CSR tradition, to contribute government’s efforts.

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