The truth about Greek Porsche owners

The full extent of the financial problems in the eurozone's struggling economies is sometimes hard to grasp.



That's why a neat, one-sentence illustration or an easy-to-remember statistic can spread among the media like wildfire.



This is especially the case if it fits a certain narrative - for example, that an economy is doomed to fail because of its profligacy.



Three widely reported statements have stood out.



Tens of thousands of chauffeur driven cars are available to Italian politicians, there are more Porsche Cayenne owners in Greece than taxpayers earning more than 50,000 euros (£41,260), and half of Spain's youth are unemployed.



So which of these is a fact and which is not?



Greek Porsche owners

One of the many eye-catching claims made about Greece was about the number of Porsche Cayennes.



"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.



But this doesn't mean that Greeks all pay the right amount of tax.



Income tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are only 4.7%, the lowest in the eurozone and less than half the 10% in the UK.



It would be good to think this is just because Greece has rock bottom tax rates but it hasn't - this is because for some people, what they actually earn and what they put on their tax forms are often different figures.



Last year, Horst Reichenbach, head of the EU taskforce offering technical help to the Greek government, said the amount of unpaid tax was estimated to be "in the order of 60bn euros [£49.49bn]".