The New York Times praises anti-austerity recipes from Antnio Costa – Economics

The New York Times article can be read as a compliment to gossip politics at a time when the romance between socialists and their allies of governance – Left Bloc and PCP – does not live the best days. Liz Alderman, NYT correspondent in Paris, presents several business initiatives as examples to overcome the difficulties of the intervention of the IMF and the European Commission in Portugal.

The case of Portugal is presented as the antithesis of European partners such as Greece, where a decade of austerity boosted by every IMF assessment has yielded other results than the Deepening of the crisis and a new cycle of cuts, unemployment and internal political conflicts and in relation with Brussels.

"When we started this process, many people said that what we wanted was impossible.We showed that there is an alternative"

The success of the Portuguese release of this Negative cycle, which the Greeks have recently escaped, is, according to the NYT, in income that the executive of António Costa defended before the European Commission: "Increasing wages in the public sector , minimum wages and pensions, and even reset vacation days to pre-caution levels despite objections from creditors such as Germany and the International Monetary Fund. "

António Costa is picked up here in a statement in which he states that "what happened in Portugal shows that too much austerity deepens the recession and creates a vicious circle." We looked for an alternative to the situation. austerity, focused on more growth and more and better jobs. "

It is an income based on trust, according to the NYT correspondent, who acted in the collective disposition of the Portuguese, thus functioning as a lever of the national economy. João Borges de Assunção, professor at the Faculty of Economic and Commercial Sciences of the Catholic University of Lisbon: "The actual expenses for stimuli were very low. But the mentality of the country has become completely different and, from an economic point of view, it has more impact than real political changes. "

It was a scenario in which investor confidence came back, production and exports had a decisive momentum and economic growth has seen levels never seen in the last decade.

According to the correspondent of the US newspaper, the success in Portugal was recognized by Brussels and Berlin with the appointment of the President of the European Commission to Mário Centeno – the Minister of Finance and crucial piece in the strategy that led to the unexpected recovery of an economy that just a few years ago was considered one of the most fragile in the eurozone as a whole.

The paper leaves a note on the difficulties that are still close to the Portuguese horizon – highlights vulnerabilities such as stagnant growth at 2.7%, the level of investment at the lowest level in four decades or the 580 euros that make the In ending with the message of António Costa: "We have not gone from the dark side to the bright side of the Moon, there is still much to do".