Furthermore, the international conditions changed after 2001. The recession of the world- economies stopped Greece's growth opportunities initially. After 2003 the growth came back internationally, but Greece's weaknesses began to burden her backs.
Consequently, late and regularly the lack of competitiveness, the increased public debt, the decreased productivity concerning the international competition, the big deficits ,the new economic crisis that began to appear from 2007 brought the Greek economy in a new precipice.
The chart below represents the root of the Greek deficit as % of the GDP.
Description of the methods for the estimation of the business cycles
In this chapter the interest is focused on the basic characteristics of the main macroeconomic variables of the Greek business cycles. The study of an economic variable can be done with the separation of its root into economic growth phenomena and business cycles phenomena. So there are two components: the component of growth(trend component) and the business cycle component (cyclical component).
The growth component is related to the regularizing trend of the economic variable we are dealing with. It is observed that this component is defined as the long-run trend of a time series which is characterized by small frequencies and is non stationary. Actually its really rare to find stationary time series.
The business cycle component is correlated with the cyclical component which is characterized by large frequencies and is a stationary stochastic process.
However, there is the view that the growth and the business cycle component are different phenomena and they behave according to the dynamic equilibrium theory. Many approaches have been developed for how to split a time series.
The traditional approach in the business cycle analysis of a time series is based on Burns and Mitchell (1946) who used the "subjective criteria". Specifically, the determination of a business cycle can take place with the chronological recording of the contraction and the expansion periods of the variable. Nowadays, this approach is not used but its contribution to the determination of macroeconomic variables behaviour is important.
An alternative approach is to estimate the growth component according to the theoretical growth model (Lucas 1977). According to the neoclassical growth model (steady state growth analysis) which assumes constant growth rate because of the exogenous labour-augmented technological change, the trend component is a simple linear trend and the cyclical component is the deviation of the series from the trend. The main disadvantage of this method is that actually the growth rate is not constant. However, there can be used functions of higher order (polynomials) but in this case the trends would be deterministic, which is not true.(责任编辑：BUG)