What is wrong with Greece?

Greece is plagued with regulations that were designed to protect special interests, according to this article in the New York Times. The result is an economy that discourages entrepreneurship.

The Greek economy is riddled with distortions — the number of trucking licenses has remained unchanged in Greece since 1971, for example, and the country is among the world’s leaders in lawyers per capita. It has one lawyer for every 250 people, compared with about one for 272 in the United States.

Is the ratio of lawyers to population a rough measure of the amount of rent-seeking a society has?