PIIGS refers to members of the European Union that are struck hardest by the recession. These countries are Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, which all have a low recovery rate, resulting in slow economic growth. This paper aims to assess which major factors contribute to the economic growth of PIIGS under existing crisis circumstances. In this paper, economic growth is measured by gross domestic product (GDP) growth, with independent variables utilised in the basic model specified as foreign direct investment, inflation, domestic savings, net export, labour force, tertiary education, private debt and public debt. Dummy variables representing country, effect, and time trend are also included in the basic model. Further model specifications are built and tested to check for robustness. The observation covers the pre- to post-financial crisis period, from 2002 to 2013. A multiple linear regression analysis estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage least squares (2SLS) with instrumental variable was used to solve the endogeneity issue. The result revealed that the net export, domestic savings, labour supply, lagged private debt, and lagged public debt were those that seemed to have significant impacts on growth. Domestic savings, labour supply, and lagged public debt were found to have a positive impact on growth, whereas net export and lagged private debt were surprisingly the other way around. This negative effect is arguably due to the negative value of net export itself. This is driven by the shrinking domestic output and exposure to lower confidence in the economy, withholding households and firms from expansion. Another interesting finding was about the positive effect on growth observed for labour regarding secondary education and the negative effect for labour regarding tertiary education. Both were observed before solving the endogeneity issue. These findings have important policy implications in the attempt to promote PIIGS’ economic growth.