More and more Greeks who left the country during the financial crisis are returning, writes the Greek newspaper “Kathimerini”, citing data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In 2021, i.e. less than 15 years after the crisis in the country, the number of returnees began to grow. In 2023, for the first time, more Greeks returned home than emigrated - by 20,000, the publication notes. Most of them are from Britain and Germany, where many Greeks have been emigrating for decades.
According to OECD data, 47% of those who returned are highly qualified, with 45% working in healthcare and engineering. 42% of all of them now live in Athens.
Athens offers tax breaks and organizes job fairs
The state is making great efforts to attract those who left it back. Among them are tax breaks, subsidies, job fairs and various advertising campaigns abroad, notes the German “Tagesspiegel”. But they are not the leading reasons for most emigrants, the publication writes. Family ties, quality of life and the Mediterranean climate are most often cited, the OECD also notes in its report. 82% cite family and friends as the main reason for returning.
The Mitsotakis government has taken a number of measures to further motivate them. If emigrants choose to work in Greece again, for example, they pay income tax on only half of their salary for the first seven years, notes “Tagesspiegel”. The state also supports businesses that are looking for staff among the diaspora. According to the OECD study, about 16% of returnees say that tax breaks have tipped the scales for them.
Greece turns "brain drain" into "brain influx"
At the beginning of the last decade, as a result of the economic crisis in the country, Greece became the victim of the largest "brain drain" from a European country since World War II. 700,000 sought a better livelihood and development for themselves and their families abroad. A very large number of them were highly educated professionals - something unseen even during the great migration waves under the military junta in the 1960s and 1970s.
This further strengthened the demographic problem in the country. While in 2007, 10.1 children were born per 1,000 inhabitants, in 2025 their number was only 6.7. For this reason, the authorities have also taken additional measures. According to the Minister of Labor, Niki Kerameos, in the past 15 years, about 734,000 people have left Greece, but of these, 473,000 have already returned. More than half are between the ages of 20 and 39. About 60 percent have a university degree, and 47 percent work in professions that require high qualifications.
Low wages and unemployment are still a problem
Despite the positive statistics, Greece continues to struggle with structural problems. Unemployment among young graduates, for example, is 13 percent - compared to an average of 5 percent for OECD countries, notes „Kathimerini".
When it comes to wages, Greece is still not competitive with Western Europe, writes „Tagesspiegel". According to Eurostat and the „Eures" portal of the European Commission (EC), qualified workers earn on average 43 percent less than the EU average. For managers, the difference is between 30 and 35 percent. And in the OECD study, many cited low pay and limited development opportunities as obstacles to returning.
Over 17,000 PhDs of Greek origin continue to live abroad, with the majority of them in the US, Germany, the UK, Switzerland and France, the OECD reports. In 2021-2022, over 800,000 people born in Greece lived in the countries that are members of the economic organization.