The effects of the 2007–08 financial crisis were strongly felt in Greece in the years that followed. In 2013, the economy entered the sixth year of recession, resulting in a substantial GDP decline. The main impact of the economic crisis was on the unemployment rate which rose eighteen percentage points from 9.6% (485,000 persons) in 2009 to 27.5% (1,330,000) in 2013 . The main share of jobless workers was from the private sector which amounted to 769,000 lost jobs in the years 2008–2012 compared to 89,000 in the public sector. At the same time, the sharp rise in the unemployment rate led to an equally sharp increase in poverty as the percentage of the population that was below the poverty threshold in 2012 increased to 38% . It is notable that in a survey from the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT)  the relative index of “people at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion” in 2013 (after five years of austerity) was higher by 8.1 percentage points compared to 2009 (35.7% vs 27.6%) whereas the corresponding increment in Eurozone (EU-28) was only +1.3 pp (24.5% in 2013 vs 23.2% in 2009). In the same survey, the rate of “severe material deprivation” in 2013 was also shown to have climbed by 14.3 percentage points since 2009 (37.3% vs 23.0%).