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Several empirical studies indicate that the existence of a large informal sector is a major obstacle to firms’ choices of innovation strategies. This paper aims to address this issue and investigates the effect of the informal sector on the innovation of formal firms in Greece.

Using the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey data, the impact of informal competition on formal firms’ innovation in Greece is investigated by testing whether formal firms use innovation as a tool to protect and sustain their competitive advantage vis-à-vis informal firms and whether overall and informal competition has an inverted-U relationship with the innovation of formal firms. The effects of bribing and other variables drawn from the empirical literature are also controlled for.

The findings fill a gap in the literature regarding the effects of the informal sector on formal economic activity in Greece, by indicating that the informal sector puts pressure on formal firms to innovate, in order to differentiate their product or service and enhance their productivity and by offering learnings to help policymakers to promote innovation in Greece.

The originality of this study is that it investigates the impact of informal competition on formal firms’ innovation in Greece, a developed economy with a large informal sector. It does so by focusing on the effects that formal firms’ informal practices have on their competitors’ innovation activities, and the role of informal competition in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage in Greece.

This study investigates the impact of institutional factors on firms investing in R&D.

The study uses data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys for the Republic of Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Portugal. A model with institutional factors as explanatory variables and firm performance factors as control variables is estimated with weighted least squares heteroscedasticity corrected regression. The reverse causality problem is addressed by using a two-stage least squares regression approach.

The findings indicate that institutional quality has a significant influence on firms' R&D expenditure. The results have several implications in relation to findings of previous research.

The inclusion of more countries that were affected by the European economic crisis will probably give more insights about the effect of institutional factors on R&D.

Policy makers have to address short-comings in institutional quality, particularly in terms of the labor regulation burden. Policy makers should prioritize anti-corruption measures to foster an environment that would attract more R&D in the Republic of Cyprus and Greece.

This study contributes to the growing body of literature investigating the impact of institutional factors on R&D. It focuses on four developed European countries that bore the brunt of the European economic crisis and have to implement their recovery and resilience plans successfully, in order to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their economic activity.

Greece's slow recovery from the severe economic depression caused by the great global financial and economic crisis that erupted in late 2000s was interrupted by the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on economic activity. This chapter looks into the factors shaping Greece's competitive position and discusses the potential to achieve a V-shaped recovery at the end of the pandemic.

The contribution of the Greek transport industry to the country's GDP has been well over the EU average. The industry is of vital importance to the efficient operation of local, national, and international economic transactions and is responsible for almost half of the value added to the Greek economy by its tourism industry. Despite its significant contribution to Greek economy, the industry is facing challenges and has not achieved its full potential. This chapter provides an overview of the transportation and storage industry and examines its general institutional framework and its overall performance, before focusing on specific policy issues for each transport mode, namely air, rail, road, and maritime transport.

A report of the International Labour Organization on undeclared work in Greece refers to failures of formal institutions which contribute to the asymmetry between state and civic morality. The particular asymmetry is explored through the context of tax morale, which is one of the major determinants of the shadow economy. Although several papers have been published on the Greek shadow economy, tax morale in Greece has not been adequately explored. This research aims to investigate the effect of the economic downturn on the factors determining the level of tax morale through primary data from a European Union-funded research project on the Greek shadow economy. The findings provide policy orientations toward transferring activities from the shadow to the official economy, a goal which is part of Europe 2020 strategy.

This paper discusses the nominal and real convergence regarding Greece being a country-member of the European Union (EU), and of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). We argued that nominal convergence is relative to Maastricht criteria when real convergence has been investigated through six different axes: (1) the five Maastricht Criteria, (2) the GDP per capita in PPP prices, (3) the real GDP growth rates, (4) the minimum wages, (5) the HDI index development, and (6) the unemployment rates. We concluded for the case of Greece that by utilizing alternative indicators, such as the Maastricht criteria, and the above criteria only nominal convergence exists while real convergence appears to be a long-term target with many obstacles. In particular, Greece has managed to achieve the criteria proposed by the EMU (Maastricht Criteria) for membership, decisively different levels of unemployment, wages, and GDP growth rate/GDP per capita in PPP prices, and different human development indexes appear for the case of Greece.

To present a new technique that contains the spread of rapid malcode, which is based on peer‐to‐peer (P2P) communication and the principles of computer hygiene.

Two proof‐of‐concept prototypes demonstrate the feasibility of the introduced technique. The effectiveness of the proposed model is supported by experimental findings through simulation tests. Additional software tools have been developed to ensure the correctness of the simulation.

Provides supportive information regarding the efficiency of computer hygiene practices. Moreover, theoretical and empirical results show that P2P networks could play an important role in the containment of worm epidemics.

A stable system deployed in large‐scale is yet to be implement in order to produce decisive results regarding the benefits of the proposed algorithm.

This paper argues that P2P networks can have significant impact on the containment of the rapid malcode.

This paper is an extended and revised version of the “PROMISing steps towards computer hygiene” paper which appeared in the INC2006 conference.

Cybercrime is a serious threat for most modern societies as it hinders the necessary adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT). This paper seeks to analyze a large number of real cases related to the cybercrime in Greece.

All cases were voluntarily submitted from Greek users, who asked for assistance to a special task force, composed of public sector employees and servants. By analyzing more than 1,000 similar cases, the paper derives a taxonomy of security‐related incidents that the Greek users encountered during the past years. Greece only recently embraced broadband technologies and, therefore, this paper is able to observe the corresponding increase of cybercriminal activities.

An analysis of the reports received by the task force indicate a clear shift in the type of reported content. A large number of recent reports from Greek users concern financial fraud schemes and phenomena of cyberbullying and cyber‐extortions, activities related primarily to the newly emerged social networking sites.

The paper offers insights into cybercrime in Greece via real case studies.