The economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman considers that Portugal is “a kind of economic miracle”, after having withstood several shocks and currently finds itself with a budget surplus and being one of the least indebted countries in the European Union (EU).
He stated this in an interview published this Tuesday in the Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Negócios, in which he talks about the situation in Portugal while taking advantage of a visit to this country.
Krugman recalled the years of the debt crisis in which he placed himself in “the same basket” to Portugal and Spain: “Both had had massive capital inflows, were seriously overvalued in terms of labor costs, had high debt levels and were facing a period of austerity.”.
In this context, he noted, Spain achieved economic recovery after years of “high unemployment, internal devaluation and falling costs”.
“Portugal had a recovery without that“, indicated the American economist, who mentioned the conversations he had on the matter with the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Olivier Blanchard, who held the position between 2008 and 2015, and how they could not explain how Portugal had achieved it.
“There are things that can be pointed out –added-, some of them attractive from Portugal, obviously. “Tourism is not trivial, but exports are also part of history.”
Asked if he still sees Portugal as a “Fascinating, adorable country, but still very poor”, as he himself said in 2013, Krugman stated that it continues to be “more poor” than many EU nations, but “not so much anymore”.
He stressed that he worked in Portuguese territory in 1976 and that the transformation in terms of infrastructure, standard of living and education is “enormous.”
“When I was there for the first time, Portugal It seemed, in many ways, more of an emerging market than a European nation, and that is not entirely true today”, he remarked.
Years later, when he analyzed the Portuguese economy again, in 2013, he observed that, despite the development and being in better conditions, there were still deep structural problems.
And ten years later, Krugman see that “there are many less” problems than there were. The last decade “It has been a good period, it is a new beginning that no one knows how to explain why”, reflected the expert.
Source: Gestion
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