If you compare Greece in 2000 with Greece in 2020, you get a confusing picture. Both years are unusual. In 2000 Greece did not yet use the euro, and 2020 was the year COVID shut the world down. In between, Greece went through a boom, a very deep crisis and a slow recovery. Two snapshots cannot show that.
This page tells the story with the World Bank numbers in this app, from 2000 to 2025.
Comparing two years is like comparing two photos: the result depends on which photos you pick. To understand Greece, compare these pairs in the app’s Change (%) tab.
| Question | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| What did the boom look like? | 2000 | 2008 |
| How bad was the crisis? | 2008 | 2013 |
| How strong was the recovery? | 2013 | 2019 |
| Is Greece back to where it was? | 2008 | 2024 |
Two tips:
The line below shows the value of everything Greece produces in a year, divided by the number of people who live there. Price rises are removed, so the years can be compared fairly. It is a rough measure of how well off the average person is.
In the boom years Greece got richer quickly. Part of that growth was paid for with borrowed money. When the borrowing stopped, output per person fell by about a quarter in five years. The recovery after 2013 was slow, COVID cut it short, and even after a strong rebound the average Greek is still poorer than in 2008.
The unemployment rate counts people who want a job and are looking for one, but cannot find one.
In 2013, 28% of people looking for work could not find a job, more than 1 in 4. Among young people it was 58%, almost 6 in 10. Since then unemployment has fallen every year. By 2025 it was back near the level it had before the crisis.
Investment is the money a country spends on things that help it earn more later: new buildings, factories, machines, roads and equipment. This chart shows it as a share of everything the economy produces.
Before the crisis Greece invested about a quarter of what it produced. During the crisis this fell to about a tenth and stayed there until 2019. It is rising again, but it is still well below where it was. Low investment for a decade is one reason incomes have not fully recovered.
Net migration is the number of people who moved into the country, minus the number who moved out. Blue bars mean more people arrived than left. Red bars mean more people left than arrived.
During the crisis many people, often young and well educated, moved abroad to find work. Between 2011 and 2015 about 250,000 more people left Greece than arrived. Treat the latest years with care: the World Bank’s estimates for them jump sharply from one year to the next.
At the same time, Greek families have few children: about 1.2 per woman, while about 2 are needed to keep the population steady. Together these explain why there are fewer Greeks now (10.4 million in 2025, down from 11.1 million in 2010) and why they are older. People aged 65 and over were 17% of the population in 2000 and 24% in 2025.
Most of Greece’s electricity used to come from lignite, a cheap and dirty kind of coal. Those power stations are being closed. Solar parks, wind farms and power stations that burn natural gas have taken their place.
In 2000 coal made 64% of Greece’s electricity. By 2025 it made 5%. Renewable sources went from 8% to 41% (2021 is the last year the World Bank reports), and natural gas from 11% to 39% (2025).
Tourism is one of Greece’s biggest earners. In 2019 visitors spent $23 billion in Greece. In 2020 they spent $6 billion, a fall of 73% in one year. COVID also lowered life expectancy for a while: from 81.6 years in 2019 to 80.1 in 2021, before it recovered to 81.8.
A comparison that ends in 2020 mixes twenty years of change with one very bad year.
The Change (%) tab compares hundreds of indicators automatically, so some odd ones end up at the top of the list. These ones do not mean what they seem to:
“Latest” is the most recent year the World Bank reports, shown in brackets.
| 2000 | 2008 | 2013 | 2019 | Latest | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Output per person (US$, price rises removed) | 18,003 | 23,924 | 17,645 | 19,217 | 21,922 (2025) |
| People looking for work who cannot find it (%) | 11.3 | 7.7 | 27.7 | 17.0 | 8.5 (2025) |
| Young people looking for work who cannot find it (%) | 29.0 | 21.6 | 58.5 | 34.8 | 21.4 (2025) |
| Investment (% of the economy) | 25.9 | 23.3 | 11.5 | 11.0 | 16.9 (2025) |
| People well below the usual Greek living standard (%) | 17.6 | 15.0 | 20.4 | 17.0 | 15.9 (2023) |
| Exports (% of the economy) | 24.0 | 22.8 | 30.3 | 39.6 | 39.5 (2025) |
| Population (millions) | 10.8 | 11.1 | 11.0 | 10.7 | 10.4 (2025) |
| People aged 65 and over (%) | 17.0 | 18.7 | 20.3 | 22.1 | 24.4 (2025) |
| Life expectancy (years) | 77.9 | 79.9 | 81.3 | 81.6 | 81.8 (2024) |
| Electricity from coal (%) | 63.7 | 52.3 | 46.2 | 24.9 | 4.7 (2025) |
| Electricity from renewable sources (%) | 8.5 | 10.3 | 25.2 | 33.2 | 40.6 (2021) |
| People using the internet (%) | 9 | 38 | 60 | 76 | 86 (2024) |
“Well below the usual Greek living standard” uses the World Bank’s societal poverty line, which moves with what is normal in each country.
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, as included in this package.