Has the external competitiveness of Greece finally been fixed?

The previous Note for Discussion looked at a path for nominal gross domestic product and developments in the implicit GDP deflator; the latter being a broad measure of inflation in the Greek economy. We ended up asking ourselves, upon inspecting this "price vector" for Greece, whether external competitiveness has improved and has now been restored. If so, this would be confidence enhancing and a valuable objective achieved with the efforts made in the recession.

Competitiveness of a macroeconomy is a broad concept, and one indicator cannot do justice to monitoring all aspects of this concept. But there are some indicators that can be checked relatively frequently, they are relatively easy to compute, and they can give us entry ways into the world of competitiveness. One of these is productivity per person employed; another is looking at prices of goods and services; a third...