A Former Prime Minister and a Socialist MP Put Portugal's Growth at 1.1 Percent a Year Since 1999, and Montenegro Answers That Nobody Changes a Country by Complaining
The Porto Commercial Association's study, coordinated by Pedro Passos Coelho, Sergio Sousa Pinto and Nuno Botelho, describes a low-growth equilibrium in which recent gains came from more people working rather than from productivity. It goes to the President and the Government.
A former prime minister, a Socialist member of parliament and the head of Porto's commercial association have put a number on Portugal's problem: average growth of about 1.1 percent a year since 1999, one of the weakest records in the European Union.
The figure comes from a study being prepared by the Associação Comercial do Porto (Porto Commercial Association) and coordinated by Pedro Passos Coelho, prime minister from 2011 to 2015, the Socialist Sérgio Sousa Pinto, and Nuno Botelho, the association's president. It is titled "Bloqueios versus Reformas: uma visão para Portugal" (Blockages versus Reforms: a vision for Portugal), has scientific support from FEP, the University of Porto's economics faculty, and was presented to journalists in Porto on Friday ahead of a public launch expected at the end of the year.
The diagnosis, in the authors' words
"Portugal does not face merely an isolated problem," the preliminary analysis concludes. "There are several blockages that reinforce one another and that help to explain a kind of low-growth equilibrium."
The central question the authors set themselves is why Portugal has grown little, lost relative position within the European Union, and still not converged in a sustained way with the more developed economies.
Their answer starts with productivity. "Since 1999, the Portuguese economy grew, on average, around 1.1 percent a year, one of the weakest performances in the European Union," the briefing says, adding that even in the stronger recent stretches the growth "resulted above all from the increase in employment, and not from expressive productivity gains". More people working, in other words, rather than each hour of work producing more.
The blockages are mapped across human capital and management quality, investment and innovation, business scale, productive specialisation, savings and financing, and the functioning of the State and its institutions. The briefing lists the specifics as "centralism, bureaucracy, taxation, the slowness of Justice, difficulties in housing and regulatory barriers".
Slow courts as an economic brake is an argument that has been made here before, and recently: a Nobel laureate visiting Lisbon this summer prescribed 90-day court rulings as the single change that would unblock growth.
The question it asks about European money
The study's treatment of EU funds is the part most likely to sting. The authors argue that "more than evaluating their execution, what matters is understanding what remains after them in productivity, innovation, investment, exports and productive capacity".
That reframing is pointed, because execution rates are exactly how Portugal currently measures itself. The country has drawn 24 percent of its 22.6 billion euro Portugal 2030 envelope, below the European average. The study's point is that even a perfect drawdown answers the wrong question.
Health, energy and financial markets are still being worked on, the briefing says. A second stage will identify structural reforms, costing them and setting out timing, financing and expected impact. The finished work goes to the President of the Republic and the Government.
The prime minister answers a warning he was not formally sent
On the same Friday, Passos Coelho was in the news for a preface he wrote to the book "Portugal na Paz dos Bloqueios" by Pedro Gomes Sanches, reported by Expresso, in which he warns that a genuinely transformative agenda needs two parliamentary terms and that "that time, which has been stretched because of the electoral fragility of governments and their scarce parliamentary support, is running out". The legislature's remaining three years, he writes, should not be spent lamenting. "Even if it is lost electorally, it is lost with the dignity of our convictions."
Luís Montenegro, opening the school year in Setúbal, was asked about none of this directly and answered it anyway. "Nobody changes the school, nobody changes the municipality and nobody changes the country with sadness and with complaints," the prime minister said. "We are not here to lament anything. We are here to face the difficulties, the challenges, and overcome them."
In the same remarks he conceded ground on education, saying that "in recent years teaching lost quality, it lost demandingness", citing the 2025 PISA results. Two members of the same political family, then, agreeing that the country is stuck, and disagreeing about whose three years are being wasted.
