The Metaxas dictatorship attempted to create a paternalistic system in order to defuse social conflicts by instituting a social security system. Indeed, in 1937 the Social Security Institute, (IKA) was established in order to materialise plans that had been initiated in the first years of the 1930s, but had not made their way through the political disturbances of the period 1932-36. In 1939 the Workers' Home was founded, which together with the National Confederation of Labour, functioned as establishment service in the area of labour. At the same time, the regime of the Fourth of August had instituted the collective negotiations but also the reference of labour disputes between employers and employees to obligatory arbitration. This policy was an imitation of the Italian "corporate" model. The organisation of "a state on an agricultural and labour basis, and therefore anti-plutocratic", to quote the phrase of the "prime mover" Ioannis Metaxas, constituted part of a vaster effort to imitate the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of Italy and Germany. That was combined with the fabricated ideology of the "Third Hellenic Civilisation", the creation of the National Youth Organisation and the general antiparliamentary and anticommunist discourse.

Despite this social-economic and ideological foundation, the Fourth of August dictatorship maintained on the international relations front particularly good relations with Britain. The identification of the throne with British politics, in combination with the lack of popular support to the regime made Metaxas particularly vulnerable to foreign pressures, a fact that forced him to start once again the amortisation payments on foreign loans to the British lenders of Greece. However, the public debt remained at low levels, at least until 1937, thanks to the autarky policy in the agricultural and industrial sector, which had started to be implemented in order to deal with the consequences of the International Crisis of 1929-32 and was pursued with force by the Metaxas dictatorship.