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The following claim has been attributed to economist Professor Herakles Polemarchakis.

A couple of years ago, there were more Cayennes circulating in Greece than individuals who declared and paid taxes on an annual income of more than €50,000, a figure only slightly above the vehicle’s list price.

The quote seems to come from the Bulletin of the Economics Research Institute, and is available here.

It has since been picked up by many news organisations, such as

However, the figures behind this claim do not seem to be referenced, and seem to be disputed (again, without references). Indeed, in the "comments" section to the linked article, the following is argued:

In Greece there are 160000 taxpayers who have income over 50000 euros per year. This means that according to this article there must be over 160000 Cayennes in Greece. But based on the local Porsche representative in Greece , from 2000 to 2009 only 1560 Cayennes have been sold in Greece! Where are the rest 159000; The numbers on this article are preposterous. Why mr Polemarchakis is telling lies and why now;

Has anyone followed up on the figures behind this claim? Is it true, or is this a slander on Greek society?

Brythan
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Tom
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    well, the counterclaim is of course incomplete as it assumes all those with the required income pay their taxes, when the claim hints at the very fact that they probably don't :) – jwenting Nov 07 '11 at 13:20
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    There is also the possibility that people bought their Porsche's in Italy, France, Spain, or anywhere else in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the rest of the world. Based on the insane tax rates in Greece I can not imagine I would buy anything there either. – Chad Nov 07 '11 at 14:22
  • Tax evasion has nonetheless been a big problem in Greece, but also other European countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_and_corruption_in_Greece – jjack Dec 24 '17 at 15:32

2 Answers2

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The claim is incorrect by more than an order of magnitude. These are the numbers according to database queries we ran at the General Secreteriat for Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. In 2010 there were 130,385 taxpayers individually declaring more than €50,000 taxable income. Adding up the numbers of the published 2009 data (tables Π6Α.09 and Π6Β.09) gives a similar figure (138,060 taxpayers). The registry used for issuing the road tax contains 5808 cars with a vehicle identification number corresponding to Porsche (WP0 or WP1).

Diomidis Spinellis
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    Hi, can you provider references for your figures? – Sklivvz Nov 07 '11 at 18:28
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    The figures come directly from SQL queries I executed on the General Secreteriat for Information Systems database. If Oddthinking can give us a table reference I can also check the corresponding (draft) 2010 tables. – Diomidis Spinellis Nov 07 '11 at 19:40
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    If running those database queries is directly accessible to the public, then I may have a new theory for you on what really caused Greece's economic problems. ;-D – Randolf Richardson Nov 07 '11 at 20:11
  • @RandolfRichardson, DVK: It's fairly trivial to set database permissions to allow a user only the privilege to **select** on certain tables. Assuming they're running the queries as a user with select-only privileges, SQL injection will not allow them to drop tables or edit the data in any other way. I'll also point it out that it would be *absolutely brilliant* if more governments did that sort of thing (that being said, I can't read Greek, so I haven't seen it in action for myself). – Jivlain Nov 07 '11 at 23:00
  • @Jivlain: ...hence my use of the word "theory." =) I actually wasn't thinking of "injection," rather just the general public having read-only access to detailed information on a per-row basis (down to data about specific individuals) being enough as this would be extremely valuable to a skilled social engineer to execute some serious large-scale scams. – Randolf Richardson Nov 08 '11 at 00:32
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    @RandolfRichardson and all: I don't know why this has not been mentioned already, but Mr. Diomidis Spinellis is actually the General Secretery for Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. It's his own tables he runs queries on. –  Nov 08 '11 at 10:14
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    @George: Well-spotted! It appears [Prof. Spinellis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diomidis_Spinellis) is the [recently-retired](http://www.neoskosmos.com/news/en/Tax-evasion-expert-resigns) General Secretary of Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. It is hard to truly prove celebrity accounts are really who they claim to be, but I can confirm his email address is consistent with his profile. Looks legit! Welcome, Prof. Spinellis. (You are also a four time winner of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest? WOW!) – Oddthinking Nov 08 '11 at 12:12
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    @Randolf Richardson I only have read-only access to a tiny faction (less than 1%) of the tables hosted at GSIS. – Diomidis Spinellis Nov 08 '11 at 14:13
  • @Diomidis Spinellis: I wasn't aware of your position when I first commented -- I hope you saw only humour in my comment as I have great respect for anyone who works at the levels of government that you do given the serious demands you must have to deal with on a daily basis. – Randolf Richardson Nov 08 '11 at 18:05
  • How do you have fractional taxpayers? (Ex: 130.385 - What, exactly, is 0.385 of a taxpayer?) Do you mean 130,385, or just 130385? – Fake Name Apr 17 '12 at 03:54
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    For that matter, is there any standardization on how the SE sites want to handle [radix points](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_point)? I know in non-english countries, `,` is generally used to separate the integer and fractional segment of a number, and `.` is used for the thousands separator (ex: 100.000,05 ). In english-speaking countries, the **exact opposite** is true (ex: 100,000.05) which is really, really annoying. Can we decide to use a standard that is less confusing? I would think that the english-language SE sites should use the english method, but that's just my opinion. – Fake Name Apr 17 '12 at 04:06
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    @FakeName I corrected the thousands separator. – Diomidis Spinellis Dec 24 '17 at 10:00
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    @FakeName Late, but [Should the network use thousands separators in numbers?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/148048/should-the-network-use-thousands-separators-in-numbers) –  Dec 24 '17 at 12:24
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    @FakeName **The standard thousands separator is ... no separator at all.** (Or at most a thin space.) Then it does not matter whether you use decimal comma or dot. – yo' Dec 30 '17 at 17:05
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This just made BBC news again, so bit more data on the myth:

"A couple of years ago, there were more Cayennes circulating in Greece than individuals who declared and paid taxes on an annual income of more than 50,000 euros, a figure only slightly above the vehicle's list price" is a quote widely reported in mainstream media and on blogs worldwide.

It came from Prof Herakles Polemarchakis, a former economics adviser to the prime minister of Greece, and now a lecturer at Warwick University in the UK.

But when asked, Prof Polemarchakis said his remark was casual, based on what had been circulating in policy circles in Greece a few years back.

He said the only hard fact he was aware of was "the per capita number of Cayennes in [the Greek city of] Larissa was twice that of Cayennes in the OECD countries".

So what are the facts?

In 2010, there were 311,428 people with declared incomes of more than 50,000 euros (£41,260) paying tax in Greece.

It was a figure that made a spokesman at Porsche laugh. Lukas Kunze says the story is "ridiculous". In total, they had only sold around 1,500 Porsche Cayennes in Greece since the launch of the luxury car nine years ago.

vartec
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  • This article (in Greek) contains a table about Cayennes sold in Greece per year. It is actually written to compare the fact with KIA Sportage sales that did not do so well. So 1570 Cayennes until 2010. https://traction.gr/porsche-cayenne-ena-elliniko-paramythi-choris-happy-end/?fbclid=IwAR1qGc-msJkCViOZn_SrQXDQHGz6RfcFfuphdn_TNb9s1ReogBeQjF9ljHw – adamo Sep 27 '21 at 10:13