Imprensa internacional foca o olho em Portugal e traça cenário negro
As últimas 48h não têm sido negras para Portugal: estás nas bocas do mundo dos principais jornais económicos internacionais e não sai nada bem no retrato.
O Financial Times dedica um especial de seis páginas a Portugal e, depois de se sentar em entrevista ao primeiro ministro, descreve José Sócrates como um «optimista inveterado».
Basta folhear as páginas da edição para perceber que – ao contrário do que a bateria de assessores, que de imediato se pôs em campo, quer fazer supor – o epíteto não vai no sentido de elogiar a teoria (tão apregoada por Sócrates) de “combater as dificuldades com coragem". Vai antes no sentido da perplexidade, em função da realidade diagnosticada ao país apontar para cenários que o jornal analisa como muito longe de se poderem considerar promissores.
Portugal também é objecto de demorado olhar nas páginas do The Wall Street Journal. Uma vez mais da análise resultam péssimas e alarmantes conclusões. É ler para crer.
Para agravar, tudo isto coincide com a notícia de que a Moody's decidiu voltar a cortar o rating à banca portuguesa. A decisão é destaque nas secções de economia da principal imprensa internacional de referência.
Seguem abaixo os artigos, para leitura integral. No final do post, clicando no link para expansão do texto, fica ainda o Dossier PT/Telefónica, um negócio conturbado que mereceu atenção a par e passo por parte do Financial Times, com o jornal a enfatizar que a guerra pela Vivo reflecte os esforços desesperados dos portugueses para continuarem a receber dividendos do exterior, destacando-se a importância de que o mercado brasileiro se reveste para Portugal.
José Sócrates: Severe test of inveterate optimist
by Peter Wisepublished: July 13 2010 16:51 | Last updated: July 13 2010 16:51
While Europe’s sovereign debt crisis has forced him to adopt successive packages of austerity measures, he has been buffeted by press coverage of unproven allegations of attempting to meddle in a local media group.
International financial markets have compelled him, like other European leaders, to make radical changes in his economic policy and the emergence of a young new opposition leader on the centre-right has seen his Socialist party fall behind in the polls.
He also considers himself unsupported in trying to instil confidence in a country facing several more years of low economic growth, confessing to journalists in June that “I often feel I’m trying to rouse the nation’s energies on my own”.
Despite all this, he remains determinedly buoyant, believing it is the job of politicians to dispel negativism. “Portugal is making progress,” he says. “We’re tackling the difficulties facing our economy and I have every confidence in the reforms we’re undertaking.”
His sanguine outlook has been strengthened by encouraging economic data. In the first quarter of this year, growth of 1.1 per cent was among the highest in the European Union. In the five months to May, he says, fiscal revenue was substantially above target and state spending lower than forecast.
He would have liked to have cut the budget deficit by only 1 percentage point to 8.3 per cent of gross domestic product this year, he says, to avoid the risk of choking off economic recovery, but was put under pressure by the sovereign debt crisis to target a reduction of 2 percentage points.
“The alternative of not making additional cuts would have been far worse,” he says. “The financing difficulties we’d have faced would have had a much more negative impact on the economy than the austerity measures we have implemented.”
Portugal will do “whatever it takes” to meets its commitment to cut the deficit to 2 per cent of GDP in four years, he says. “But performance over the past six months has exceeded expectations and I’m confident the plan we have set out will deliver the intended results.”
Optimism for Mr Sócrates means “tackling difficulties with courage”. Portugal may not yet be above the European average in terms of living standards or competitiveness, he says, “but I challenge anyone to show me a country that has been more reformist over the past five years”.
His government’s reform of pensions in 2007, he says, has taken Portugal off the list of countries with social security systems at risk.
Public sector workers who retired at 60 now retire at 65, in common with private sector workers. A sustainability factor was also introduced, giving employees the option of working longer or receiving slightly lower pensions, as life expectancy forecasts increase.
No other EU country, he says, has cut back its public administration as much as Portugal in recent years, reducing the number of civil servants by 73,000, or 10 per cent, between 2005 and 2009 and cutting the public sector wage bill from 14.8 per cent to below 12 per cent of GDP.
Mr Sócrates says his was the only country to revise its labour laws at the height of the recession in 2008, facing down trade union protests to introduce more flexibility.
“According to the OECD, Portugal had one of the most rigid labour markets in the developed world. Now, we are close to Germany and better than France,” he says. The challenge for the future is to apply the legislation more effectively.
In education, he says, his reforms have seen every child at primary school taught English as a second language and given a laptop computer. A €2.45bn ($3.09bn) programme to rebuild, modernise and re-equip 205 secondary schools by 2011 has passed the half-way stage. More than 35 per cent of 20-year-olds are at university.
An American recently stood as a candidate for rector of the country’s biggest university under new regulations that have opened up the system.
“Our progress in science has been absolutely extraordinary,” he says. Between 2005 and 2008, Portugal increased public investment in research from 0.7 to 1.55 per cent of GDP, overtaking Ireland and Spain. The country now has 7.6 researchers for every 1,000 workers, one of the highest levels in Europe.
Investments in green energy saw 70 per cent of the country’s electricity produced from renewable sources in the first five months of this year, he says. Creating Europe’s first national recharging network for electric cars aims to bring renewable energy to the transport sector.
Support for the “digital economy” has seen Portugal move from 16th to first place in the World Bank rankings for “e-government” in five years. In February this year, Mr Sócrates says, 32 companies a day were being created online in a process that takes about half an hour.
“Have these reforms solved all Portugal’s problems,” the prime minister asks.
“Of course not. But I answer for the past five years. We are dealing head-on with the difficulties facing the economy and I’m very confident of the benefits these reforms will bring.”
via Finantial Times
Para ler o dossier na íntegra aqui

Interessante cruzar a leitura com os especiais que o jornal elaborou sobre a Grécia e a Espanha:
Portugal Feels Austerity's Bite
After Years of Budget Cuts, Its Economy Isn't Healed; Scenario for Others in Europe

A woman throws flowers in early May in Lisbon as demonstrators protest Portugal's austerity measures. photo: Associated Press
JULY 14, 2010
by Brian Blackstone
Indebted European countries from Greece and Italy to Spain have in recent weeks set off down a common path toward fiscal recovery, promising to slash spending and raise taxes.
One sobering scenario of what they may be up against comes from Europe's southwestern edge: Portugal, which embarked a decade ago on a similar journey of austerity, higher taxes and intermittent spending cuts, is still cutting—and still struggling.
On Tuesday, Moody's Investors Service cut Portugal's sovereign debt rating by two notches, to A1, citing the country's sluggish growth prospects and concerns that economic reforms in areas like labor markets won't bear fruit.
Moody's "remains concerned about the economy's medium-term growth potential," said Anthony Thomas, senior analyst at the rating agency, adding that Portugal's government debt, as a percentage of gross domestic product, has risen rapidly in the past two years.
The experience of Portugal—an early beneficiary of the euro zone's economic benefits and one of the earliest to experience the problems of being tied to a common currency—offers what some economists call a blueprint for what could be a long road to recovery for Spain, Greece and others.
"You have to be prepared that you are in for stagnant times," says Antonio de Sousa, who was Portugal's central banker in the late 1990s when the euro was created.
European Central Bank officials are optimistic that austerity is the right economic recipe for countries struggling to cope with the bursting of debt-fueled bubbles and a loss of competitiveness versus larger peers such as Germany. That contrasts with the prescription advocated by the U.S., of attempting to stimulate the economy with government spending, and pay debts as revenue grows.
"Fiscal consolidation and growth are not mutually exclusive," ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said last week. "Prudent fiscal management provides the basis for balanced and sustainable growth."
Two decades ago, Portugal was regarded as an economic success. The country in the early and mid-1990s took steps to liberalize its economy, including an ambitious program of privatizing state companies, that led to rising wages and an investment-led boom.
Membership in the euro was expected to build on those gains by giving Portugal a stable currency, low interest rates and unfettered access to one of the world's largest trade zones. The country's booming economy left it in good shape to meet the common-currency zone annual budget deficit limit of no more than 3% of GDP.
But Portugal's boom contained the seeds of its own destruction. The rise in government tax revenue removed the urgency for unpopular spending cuts and economic liberalization. The government added workers, costs that would be hard to trim later.
Meanwhile, after Portugal adopted the euro in 1999, its dominant textiles industry wasn't able to use cheaper loans and a large common market to build a foundation for longer-term growth. Portugal's textiles were too expensive to compete with cheaper goods from China or Eastern Europe, but also lacked the high-fashion credentials of those from France or Italy.
Portugal's deficit soon exceeded the zone's limit. In 2002 it became the first euro-zone member to be slapped with an excessive-deficit warning.
At a time when Spain, Ireland and Greece were sailing through the early years of the euro on housing bubbles and debt-fueled spending, Portugal began to retrench.
Lisbon went through modest austerity drives every few years beginning in the early 2000s. These included civil-service wage freezes and increases in value-added taxes that further weighed on the economy. When that wasn't sufficient, Lisbon also pushed through pension changes, including greater penalties for early retirement.
Portuguese voters tired of the measures, leading to political upheaval. The country had four prime ministers from 2001 to 2005.
Many economists say the cuts haven't gone far enough.
Government spending still accounts for more than half of Portugal's GDP. Portugal's budget deficit last year, at 9.4% of GDP, is lower than those of Greece, Ireland or Spain, but still more than three times as high as euro-zone rules permit.
At the same time, its economy has remained tepid: Portugal's growth rate, around 5% annually in the late 1990s, has averaged 0.8% since 2001, putting it near the bottom of the euro zone.
The country is showing signs of clawing its way out of a debt and recession spiral. Its GDP grew more than 4%, at an annualized rate, during the first quarter, thanks to gains in exports and domestic spending. Bank lending to business and households is growing.
The government is trying a more aggressive deficit-cutting plan than in the past, including higher value-added taxes and a high-wage surcharge aimed at bringing its deficit down to 7.3% this year.
But critics of Europe's approach say cutting spending and raising taxes won't be enough to save peripheral economies that lag the zone's primary economic engine, Germany, in innovation and productivity. They say these countries must undertake deep structural reforms in areas like labor markets, regulations and taxation.
Many business leaders in the industrial north say Portugal's future depends on the government's will to further liberalize the economy. The north is home to 80% of Portugal's approximately 7,000 textile-related companies, and has been hard hit by the industry's decline. Nationally, textile-related employment fell more than 25% from 2003 to 2009, to just over 160,000 workers.
"We face a very difficult moment and are probably going to face an even worse moment for the next decade," says Paulo Vaz, head of the textile association, known as ATP, in the heart of Portugal's textile region near Braga, a city of 200,000 near the coastal city of Porto.
To adjust, some companies have focused on marketing, service and innovation, with an emphasis on exporting to fast-growing countries like Brazil, to which Portugal has cultural ties. While investments once flowed primarily from Portugal to Brazil, now it's going both ways.
But such changes will take many more years to fundamentally change Portugal's €163 billion ($205 billion) economy, and Lisbon's latest austerity drive could start to bite later this year, economists warn.
Portugal's central bank on Tuesday raised its growth forecast for 2010 but cut its 2011 forecast to 0.2% from 0.8%, citing deficit-reduction efforts and an ailing labor market.
"If Portugal is a blueprint, we have to look for several years of underperformance in Spain," says Ralph Solveen, economist at Commerzbank.
* Jeffrey T. Lewis in Lisbon contributed to this article.
via The Wall Street Journal

Segundo a publicação norte-americana, o crescimento de Portugal no início dos anos 90 “plantou as sementes da sua própria destruição”, reduzindo a urgência de implementação de cortes impopulares e liberalização. Isso saldou-se num aumento dos funcionários ao serviço do Estado, que se reflectiu num crescimento da despesa “difícil de reduzir mais tarde”.
Foi assim que Portugal iniciou uma subidas de impostos e reduções “intermitentes” da despesa há uma década, iniciando um período em que a economia nacional cresceu ao ritmo médio de 0,8% ao ano, o que fica aquém dos “cerca de 5% no final dos anos 90”.
“Tem de se estar preparado para tempos de estagnação” disse António de Sousa ao "Wall Street Journal", actual presidente da Associação de Bancos Portugueses (APB) e membro do Banco de Portugal aquando da criação do euro em 1990.

António de Sousa ao Wall Street Journal.
As medidas de austeridade "mais agressivas" levadas a cabo pelo Governo terão de continuar a ser implementadas, podendo começar a penalizar o crescimento em 2011, de forma a alterar “fundamentalmente” a economia portuguesa, diz o artigo assinado por Jeffrey T. Lewis, citando avisos de economistas.
“Se Portugal for uma projecção [para outras nações que enfrentem austeridade], temos de esperar vários anos de subdesempenho em Espanha”, disse o economista do Commerzbank Ralph Solveen ao Wall Street Journal.
Moody`s corta rating de oito bancos portugueses
A agência de notação financeira cortou o rating de oito bancos portugueses na sequência do corte, ontem, em dois níveis do rating da dívida pública portuguesa. Cinco bancos caem um nível e outros três descem dois níveis, estando neste grupo o BCP, que nos últimos dias esteve envolto em polémicas relacionadas com rumores de iminente ruptura financeira.Ontem, a agência de notação cortou em dois níveis o rating da dívida de Portugal em dois níveis, de Aa2 para A1, justificando a decisão com o facto de "a força financeira do Governo português continuar a enfraquecer a médio prazo", em resultado da degradação das contas públicas e das débeis perspectivas de crescimento económico.
A Moody's comunicou esta quarta-feira o corte em um nível no rating da CGD (Caixa Geral de Depósitos), do Santander Totta, do BES (Banco Espírito Santo), do BPI (Banco Português de Investimento) e do Espírito Santo Financial Group. Já o BCP (Banco Comercial Português), o Montepio Geral e o Banif sofreram um corte de dois níveis. No que respeita ao BPN (Banco Português de Negócios), a Moody's mantém para já o nível de Baa3/Prime-3, estando ainda a analisar um possível corte.
Papel dentro do sistema nacional dita amplitude dos cortes
A Moody's explica que o corte no Santander Totta, BES e BPI foi de apenas um nível devido à maior flexibilidade financeira de que dispõem e que lhes permite compensar o impacto de um menor apoio sistémico. A agência refere ainda que a probabilidade de apoio sistémico disponível para estes bancos é maior, o que é explicado pelo papel proeminente que assumem no sistema financeiro português.
Caso diferente é o de BCP, Montepio Geral e Banif, bancos com um rating individual mais baixo e que sofreram um corte de dois níveis por estarem "mais expostos a um enfraquecimento do apoio sistémico".
A excepção na aplicação deste critério é a CGD, que, apesar do rating individual ser mais baixo, sofre um corte em apenas um nível, porque continua a beneficiar de forte apoio sistémico devido à sua dimensão e condição de banco completamente detido pelo Estado.
publicado a 14 de Julho de 2010
por Camilo Lourenço
José Sócrates disse ao "Financial Times" que não houve outro país que tivesse feito mais reformas estruturais nos últimos cinco anos do que Portugal. Entre elas, destacou duas: a do mercado de trabalho e a da Administração Pública. No primeiro caso, disse que a reforma foi feita num ano de recessão (2008) e que isso permitiu colocar o País à frente da França e quase ao nível da Alemanha. No segundo caso, Sócrates até concretizou o resultado das medidas: o País reduziu 73 mil funcionários públicos entre 2005 e 2009.
No mesmo dia em que o primeiro-ministro falou à "bíblia", o "Diário Económico" conversou com Anthony Thomas, um dos responsáveis da Moody's, que na véspera baixara o "rating" de Portugal em dois níveis. A certa altura, Thomas diz que uma das razões para o corte se deveu à análise das perspectivas de crescimento de Portugal, "não apenas no curto prazo", tendo concluído que "não há provas reais de que as reformas estruturais que o Governo fez gerem uma maior dinâmica de crescimento".
E pronto, aqui temos duas versões contraditórias das tais reformas... estruturais. Confrontando as duas, mesmo sabendo que uma delas vem do responsável de uma das (tais) vilipendiadas agências de "rating", não é difícil dizer quem tem razão. Porque um primeiro-ministro que diz que a saída de 73 mil funcionários públicos resulta de uma reforma estrutural, quando ela aconteceu por mera reforma, não pode ser levado a sério. Como os próprios mercados estão a mostrar...
15.Jul.2010
Sócrates destaca, igualmente, que o Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) cresceu 1,1% no primeiro trimestre deste ano e garante que Portugal vai fazer "tudo o que for necessário" para manter o compromisso de cortar o défice para 2% do PIB em quatro anos.
No que toca ao aspecto laboral, e citando a Organização para Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Económico (OCDE), o primeiro-ministro declara ao jornal britânico que "Portugal tinha um dos mercados de trabalho mais rígidos do mundo desenvolvido", enquanto agora está "próximo da Alemanha e melhor do que a França".
Quanto ao progresso na área da Ciência é considerado pelo chefe do Governo como "absolutamente extraordinário", com o investimento público na investigação a subir de 0,7% para 1,55% do PIB entre 2005 e 2008, superando assim a Irlanda e a Espanha.
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