Greece’s capital Athens has been picked as the fourth best European city to start a business enterprise, a survey by UK website Takepayments has found. Only Cambridge, Tallinn and Warsaw scored higher than the Greek capital.
Starting a business in Athens can take as little as four days and there are only three procedures required to do so.
In addition, there has been a 182% increase in the number of businesses registered since 2006, the survey found, which is the second highest in its rankings.
Athens also boasts a growing number of innovative tech-based businesses that are taking off, particularly within the travel and hospitality sectors.
The new Enterprising Cities Index by Takepayments, has ranked 37 European cities based on a range of factors relating to enterprise opportunity and growth.
The research reveals Europe’s most enterprising cities by calculating a city score which is based on the following five factors: the number of startup procedures and the amount of days required to start a business according to the UN data and the World Bank; the number of new businesses registered based on the same sources; the percentage growth in interest in starting a business on Google; and the Economic Freedom Index score on a national level in 2022 based on data from Heritage. = via kathimerini
If you like bureaucracy.
I think the figures are probably distorted – there are a lot of people becoming self-employed in Athens because there aren’t enough jobs available . . .
I wonder how far down the list Athens would move if they included in their criteria the difficulty in closing a business?
they’ve got to be joking. starting a business in four days? maybe if it’s some kind of hot-air online outfit that doesnt actually do anything. I think they are taking the word ‘business’ to mean ‘having a tax id to be able to cut reciepts and invoices’ and not all the mountain of permits etc demanded to actually operate any kind of, you know, real business that actually does anything. i suppose if all you do is buy dry goods online and sell them online again, and you call that a business, then you might be able to get it going quickly. otherwise youll take months just to get all the certificates , documents, etc, to get the permits demanded, etc etc.. and then if you dont keep up with that bureacracy, corss all your t’s and dot all your i’s always within their arbitrary deadlines, big fines and troubles. Having set up a business in greece, and having done it also in switzerland, i must say that it’s enormously simpler in switzerland! (and the taxes etc are way lower, and they actually make it easy to do everything by the book, instead of treating everyone like a suspect all the time!)
or i suppose if you are some big corporation and you have friends in a government ministry somewhere, then many things become easy.
So much glass half full pessimism and no praise about Greece’s dramatic economic progress?
Greece is getting permission to repay loans early. It is also dramatically recovering from its brutally punished low depths of a decade of serious depression not just recession – however termed counterproductive, insane, and mean spirited at the time to literally multiply its debt to pay rich banks on paper without Greece seeing the money. Not a peep anywhere about this injustice. instead, investors, the real pigs who labelled Iceland a terrorist nation just because it could not re-pay its debt, called disadvantaged nations “PIIGS”. It was endless, even the pre-Brexit totalitarian EU saw a US admin praise Greece for its sacrifices and repay loans its lenders never honored after reunifying. It was so endless and yet so little said…why?! Money talks , talking walks?|
It is good, and not just about time, that Greece recovers.
Greece “has been picked as the fourth best European city to start a business”, why all the poo-pooed pessimism to good news when it is not fake news but ongoing great news .