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Saturday, 26 February 2011

LIVING THE LOL IN CYPRUS

It's always good to be able to showcase the work of a successful friend. These days however the work of Alex Apostolides over at http://www.econcyma.blogspot.com/ is proving particularly useful. Alex specialises in the economic history of his native Cyprus, but also Malta, which is now making a thoroughly savoury name for itself by opposing Libyan sanctions.

Reading his latest post I realised I haven't followed the Cypriot economy very well in the past two years, lulled to complacency by my prejudices. They have been as follows:

  • because Cyprus is a much smaller country, it is easier to avoid enormous amounts of administrative waste and corruption there than it is in Greece.

  • because Cyprus has had British influences to those institutions which Greece borrowed from the French or Germans, it should be a more flexible economy than Greece in many ways and have a more flexible civil administration.

  • the looming presence of a major national threat has focused the minds of Cypriots a little bit more on the greater good and made consensus a much more acceptable practice in their country than it is in Greece.
I have other prejudices of course that are not so positive. But the ones above allowed me to ignore economic news coming out of Cyprus in the conviction that our funny-sounding cousins would muddle through.

It turns out I am wrong. Over to you Alex! 

2 comments:

  1. I would like to dedicate this award too...
    Thanks mate you know that I changed my style thanks to the great work you do here. Need to think on how we could syndicate all the relevant blogs together to have a more powerful voice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. At your services! Many thanks for the H/T! We are now the luvvies of Graecophone econblogging, Alex.

    I hear you re: the syndication issue! I have some ideas, just keep the sidebar with the econblogs you follow on your blog and I'll get back to you with suggestions.

    ReplyDelete

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