Creative Commons

There is no doubt that the greatest challenge the global economy faces is how to respond to the rapid changes in today’s competition-intensive marketplace and mostly how to cope with the uncertainty created by the economic crisis. Now, more than ever countries’ economies need to be familiar with the concept of competitiveness and the efficiency of the Business environment as their evaluation helps to critical strategic movements for sustainable development. This study aims to examine Greece profile by measuring the economy’s competitiveness and evaluating the Business environment, in comparison to the economies of the Black Sea Region countries and highlight those issues that the country needs to pay attention. The analysis was based to two of the most common indices: the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) by the World Economic Forum and the Doing Business Index (DBI) by the World Bank. According to the Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013, Greece scored on the 96th level in a total of 144 countries, which means six places lower than the previous year and significantly below the average of the Black Sea Region GCI (3,36 vs 4,14). Following the past results, Greece has significantly worsen its position since 2002, when the score was on the 36th place, which means that Greece has lost 58 levels as far as competitiveness is concerned. As a part of this analysis, this work tries to identify the issues and answer to questions such as: why Greece seem to be the worst performer, what happened during the period from 2002 to 2013 and how those scores can be improved so as the country to become competitive and come out the economic crisis? However and during the development of the study the new GCI Report 2013/14 was produced, according to which Greece is ranked in the 91st position and scored 3,93 in a total of 148 countries, a quite impressive progress, for which a special reference is made, at the end of the first part of the study.