Greece’s economy is likely to remain in intensive care for years and likely to recover only with further international assistance, was the main conclusion of papers presented by experts at the Fall 2015 Brookings Panel on Economic Activity Conference on September 10-11.

Nobel Economics laureate Christopher Pissarides from LSE, and Tufts University professor Yannis Ioannides, in their paper "Is the Greek Crisis One of Supply or Demand?", maintain that Greece will continue to need help from international institutions for longer than expected, because not only is Greek debt too high to allow the government flexibility in its budgetary policies, but the country also suffers from serious structural problems such as low productivity and lack of competitiveness. The key difficulty in Greece is the implementation of reform, due to deep rooted political influences that do not allow an independent public sector that will implement the reforms impartially.

In "The Pitfalls of External Dependence: Greece, 1829-2015", Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Munich University Christoph Trebesch note that Greece has been in a cycle of excessive borrowing and default since 1833 and that it will take dramatic action to break this cycle.
A key ingredient in the resolution to the ongoing Greek crisis is a deep nominal haircut on official and possibly private external debt to restore the country’s economic viability. Even with that, a policy priority for Greece is to reorient towards domestic sources of funding.

In their paper "Greek Budget Realities: No Easy Options", economists Christopher House and Linda Tesar from the University of Michigan expect that Greece’s forced austerity will be painful, since it will require sizable declines in output.

Fiscal adjustment required in order for the country to meet its full debt obligations will be large and substantially more costly given that Greece is a small open economy that is integrated with the larger European economy.

Economists Julian Schumacher and Beatrice Weder di Mauro from the University of Mainz, in "Diagnosing Greek debt sustainability: Why is it so hard?", find that there has been a serial misdiagnosis of Greek debt sustainability by lenders and maintain that eurozone countries should consider debt forgiveness after an extended period of good policy track record, in some scheme akin to the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) process.