6 ms·

The Portuguese case is quite different, I think. Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal needs to import a lot from the world, but has ve

The Portuguese case is quite different, I think. Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal needs to import a lot from the world, but has very little to offer in exchange. They found something: their real estate and city center spaces. The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's not a self-sustainable economy and the world won't work for them for free. If the Portuguese want to solve this issue, one way is to study what else could they develop internally that would be attractive in the world trade market. Also, foreigners are looking for the European passport, not for Portugal per se. If Portugal were to follow UK's path, demand for their Golden Visa would drop dramatically. It doesn't benefit the rich, only. By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country.

caycep 4y ago
The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? Ukraine had traditional industries but it seems like the IT/knowledge worker base they built up over the past 5-10 years seems to be softening some of the economic blows of the war for them, but I can't imaging IT is the answer to every country...
- outworlder 4y ago
  > The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? They are looking to expand their maritime territory. They might have a credible claim to it.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  Look at Singapore, for example. Its situation was orders of magnitude worse than Portugal decades ago. Now they are probably twice as better. The key is: stop complaining about "the rich is this, the rich is that" and start thinking about how to be competitive in the 21st century. There are many opportunities, but are Portuguese citizens interested in taking the effort and sacrifice to explore them? The answer to this question is the real explanation for the hard time they're going through, not "rich-blaming".
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Singapore's public housing is propped up by the fact that they have a huge proportion of their population that are totally ineligible for it, but pay the taxes to support it. I think something like only 60% of Singapore has the citizenship or correct criteria of permanent residency to obtain public housing. If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship, we would have a comparable public housing tax base.
    - rmbyrro 4y ago
      I'm not talking about how real estate works there, but how they became a sophisticated and highly competitive economy in a few decades.
      - notch656a 4y ago
        May want to go back and delete your comments about real estate then. Honestly without exploiting foreigners to subsidize their housing, these tag line here would probably just as likely be "Singaporeans Can No Longer Afford to Live in Singapore." If you live in an advanced urban economy, with relatively open borders and free market real estate, you have to get with the program or get forced out. You can argue that's a good thing, or a bad thing. ------------- >Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigner Pretty unsophisticated logic here. The idea that something good was obtained, therefore a policy can't be exploitive, is on face absolutely an unfounded and absurd claim.
        rmbyrro 4y ago
        Are foreigners kept there against their will? I bet they're happy to live there, despite the housing costs. Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigners. I'd love to have a Singaporean passport and be able to live there if I could afford. May want to keep your comment deletion considerations to yourself.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  I think maintaining distinctiveness as a country is the best possible economic security, instead of turning it into an airport mall of fast food chains and crappy condos. France has maintained this somewhat, but not without a lot of struggle. Globalized chains create a radical monopoly in the cities they are in because they reduce the amount of risk/reward for local entrepreneurs, and require high amounts of capital to start. It's why downtown SF is such a cultural desert of basic and Times Square is just a theme park to itself. The policies that encourage globalized businesses create a homogenization that makes the desirable diversity that emerges organically impossible. Portugal could impose a foreign buyers tax, use it's egalitarian/socialistic political culture to incentivise some small-n natalism, and leverage the unbelievable cultural resources it has as somewhere that is a respite from the blob of tourists that it has allowed to imbalance its economy. It's not so much IT that would change the economy, but honestly - math. It's the only real social advantage that a country can organize to leverage, and the next country that triples down on its math education investment is going to be the next power base. Given what I've seen there that the article captures perfectly, it's probably their only hope.
- andrepd 4y ago
  Unfortunately education in Portugal is one of the worst in Europe. It would need a massive investment with a visionary direction to start to see results 15 years later. 4-year terms do not lend themselves well to long-term national projects like that. Ironically, excellent education might be one of the most positive legacies the Communist regimes left to Eastern European countries, and part of why countries like Estonia or Poland will be better poised in the near future.
  - park777 4y ago
    Incorrect. Education in Portugal was one of the worst in Europe. Portugal is the only country in the OECD that has consistently risen in PISA scores since their inception in 2000. Portugal was bottom of the table in 2000, and now it's at middle. Not the best, but not the worst either. Source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4_8 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4_...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  It's not just Ukraine. Central and Eastern Europe in general has seen plenty of sustained growth. You just need the right policy attitude for it, which has historically been quite problematic in places like Portugal (see "The incredible shrinking Portuguese firm" for one especially clear example).
- pdpi 4y ago
  Portuguese IT is pretty good in general, and that could easily have been part of the solution. The problem is that there was a large exodus of talent in the early 2010s (including yours truly), and that has caused some serious brain drain.
  - iostream25 4y ago
    I remember Passos Coelho suggesting that the young will need to emigrate for work, circa the time of the crisis/austerity.
    - pdpi 4y ago
      Yup. So I did.
  - brabel 4y ago
    The company I work for has 3 devs in Portugal, working remotely... good people, very skilled, and it's much more affordable to pay them well compared to their local market than trying to hire locally, even if locally (more expensive European country), salaries are still a far cry from those of the USA, let alone Silicon Valley. With remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe Silicon Valley is still willing to pay so much more money for devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and numerous other countries with high education and infrastructure, but much, much lower salaries.
    - pkaye 4y ago
      > With remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe Silicon Valley is still willing to pay so much more money for devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and numerous other countries with high education and infrastructure, but much, much lower salaries. In the US there are 50 states to choose from for remote workers. And then outside that is the rest of North/South America all within a narrow time zone band.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Good drug policy, car-less urbanity, and a good tech scene. With California weather and 1/5 the cost? Sounds great. When can I move?
- asdff 4y ago
  They could start building housing
- prmoustache 4y ago
  I read somewhere that there was a raise in bicycle factories in Portugal. Some euro companies are attractee by the idea of being able to put a made/assembled in europe label while keeping labour cost low, avoid asian supply issues and portugal provides that.
petre 4y ago
> The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's just parking money. It's the last thing a socialist country like Portugal needs, because it screws up the real estate market making housing unafordable to the general population, who lives, works there, pays taxes and maybe has kids. What they can do is tax all property as if one is renting it, like Switzerland does and use the 6 month median rent as the tax base.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  If parking money is the problem, I guess an indirect solution would be to give people other places to park their money.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  do the people moving there not pay taxes, work there, and raise kids also? I think I'm missing the point. It's simple to solve it by making foreigners pay much higher annual taxes on the privilege to live there and capping real estate prices for locals vs foreigners. Prevent foreigners from actually being able to buy real estate. Then everyone wins.
  - petre 4y ago
    Not really, they're either retired or buying property to park money, like the rich Chinese are doing in Vancouver and Auckland. The issue is that they already bought real estate and drove the prices up, so now is the perfect time to extract taxes from them. The Lisbon downtown is cruise ship territory anyhow, I fully understand why a group of youths was protesting against (those kind of) tourists. They treat every city like it's a theme park.
jseliger 4y ago
Portugal should just do what the U.S. and Canada should also do: built more housing: https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-services-a-huge-economic-opportunity.html https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-service.... It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a particular parcel a hundred years ago.
- tffcccdredf 4y ago
- _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
  I remember travelling to Portugal in the early 2000's and our host describing Portugal's national bird as the (construction) crane. Not sure if the pun translates well to other languages. Are they not still doing that?
vannevar 4y ago
>By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country. Maybe, but only if the increase in wages paid keeps up with the rising rents. And remember that in unregulated capitalism, most of the income from increased economic activity is captured by the wealthiest tiers, with only negligible increases for the vast majority. The rising tide indeed raises all boats, but it raises some boats far more than most. If rent rises 10% but median wages rise only 2%, most people will be losing ground, not gaining.
DrNosferatu 4y ago
I disagree, Portugal does offer something interesting: Cheap labor. In fact, some of the cheapest in the EU - both qualified and non. It even can be said that the current Portuguese Economic Model is intra-EU salary dumping. (and a lot of rent-seeking)
jollybean 4y ago
Instead of selling their land, they can lease it, with a heavy tax on top.
- 0x457 4y ago
  Foreigners buying land there are because it gives them a path to European passport or at very least nearly instant permanent residency. Not because they want to live in Portugal. Portugal requirement is "just" €280,000 which is extremely low - their neighbor's, Spain, requirement is €500,000. Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.

caycep 4y ago

The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? Ukraine had traditional industries but it seems like the IT/knowledge worker base they built up over the past 5-10 years seems to be softening some of the economic blows of the war for them, but I can't imaging IT is the answer to every country...

outworlder 4y ago
> The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? They are looking to expand their maritime territory. They might have a credible claim to it.
rmbyrro 4y ago
Look at Singapore, for example. Its situation was orders of magnitude worse than Portugal decades ago. Now they are probably twice as better. The key is: stop complaining about "the rich is this, the rich is that" and start thinking about how to be competitive in the 21st century. There are many opportunities, but are Portuguese citizens interested in taking the effort and sacrifice to explore them? The answer to this question is the real explanation for the hard time they're going through, not "rich-blaming".
- notch656a 4y ago
  Singapore's public housing is propped up by the fact that they have a huge proportion of their population that are totally ineligible for it, but pay the taxes to support it. I think something like only 60% of Singapore has the citizenship or correct criteria of permanent residency to obtain public housing. If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship, we would have a comparable public housing tax base.
  - rmbyrro 4y ago
    I'm not talking about how real estate works there, but how they became a sophisticated and highly competitive economy in a few decades.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      May want to go back and delete your comments about real estate then. Honestly without exploiting foreigners to subsidize their housing, these tag line here would probably just as likely be "Singaporeans Can No Longer Afford to Live in Singapore." If you live in an advanced urban economy, with relatively open borders and free market real estate, you have to get with the program or get forced out. You can argue that's a good thing, or a bad thing. ------------- >Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigner Pretty unsophisticated logic here. The idea that something good was obtained, therefore a policy can't be exploitive, is on face absolutely an unfounded and absurd claim.
      - rmbyrro 4y ago
        Are foreigners kept there against their will? I bet they're happy to live there, despite the housing costs. Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigners. I'd love to have a Singaporean passport and be able to live there if I could afford. May want to keep your comment deletion considerations to yourself.
motohagiography 4y ago
I think maintaining distinctiveness as a country is the best possible economic security, instead of turning it into an airport mall of fast food chains and crappy condos. France has maintained this somewhat, but not without a lot of struggle. Globalized chains create a radical monopoly in the cities they are in because they reduce the amount of risk/reward for local entrepreneurs, and require high amounts of capital to start. It's why downtown SF is such a cultural desert of basic and Times Square is just a theme park to itself. The policies that encourage globalized businesses create a homogenization that makes the desirable diversity that emerges organically impossible. Portugal could impose a foreign buyers tax, use it's egalitarian/socialistic political culture to incentivise some small-n natalism, and leverage the unbelievable cultural resources it has as somewhere that is a respite from the blob of tourists that it has allowed to imbalance its economy. It's not so much IT that would change the economy, but honestly - math. It's the only real social advantage that a country can organize to leverage, and the next country that triples down on its math education investment is going to be the next power base. Given what I've seen there that the article captures perfectly, it's probably their only hope.
andrepd 4y ago
Unfortunately education in Portugal is one of the worst in Europe. It would need a massive investment with a visionary direction to start to see results 15 years later. 4-year terms do not lend themselves well to long-term national projects like that. Ironically, excellent education might be one of the most positive legacies the Communist regimes left to Eastern European countries, and part of why countries like Estonia or Poland will be better poised in the near future.
- park777 4y ago
  Incorrect. Education in Portugal was one of the worst in Europe. Portugal is the only country in the OECD that has consistently risen in PISA scores since their inception in 2000. Portugal was bottom of the table in 2000, and now it's at middle. Not the best, but not the worst either. Source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4_8 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4_...
zozbot234 4y ago
It's not just Ukraine. Central and Eastern Europe in general has seen plenty of sustained growth. You just need the right policy attitude for it, which has historically been quite problematic in places like Portugal (see "The incredible shrinking Portuguese firm" for one especially clear example).
pdpi 4y ago
Portuguese IT is pretty good in general, and that could easily have been part of the solution. The problem is that there was a large exodus of talent in the early 2010s (including yours truly), and that has caused some serious brain drain.
- iostream25 4y ago
  I remember Passos Coelho suggesting that the young will need to emigrate for work, circa the time of the crisis/austerity.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    Yup. So I did.
- brabel 4y ago
  The company I work for has 3 devs in Portugal, working remotely... good people, very skilled, and it's much more affordable to pay them well compared to their local market than trying to hire locally, even if locally (more expensive European country), salaries are still a far cry from those of the USA, let alone Silicon Valley. With remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe Silicon Valley is still willing to pay so much more money for devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and numerous other countries with high education and infrastructure, but much, much lower salaries.
  - pkaye 4y ago
    > With remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe Silicon Valley is still willing to pay so much more money for devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and numerous other countries with high education and infrastructure, but much, much lower salaries. In the US there are 50 states to choose from for remote workers. And then outside that is the rest of North/South America all within a narrow time zone band.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Good drug policy, car-less urbanity, and a good tech scene. With California weather and 1/5 the cost? Sounds great. When can I move?
asdff 4y ago
They could start building housing
prmoustache 4y ago
I read somewhere that there was a raise in bicycle factories in Portugal. Some euro companies are attractee by the idea of being able to put a made/assembled in europe label while keeping labour cost low, avoid asian supply issues and portugal provides that.

petre 4y ago

> The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's just parking money. It's the last thing a socialist country like Portugal needs, because it screws up the real estate market making housing unafordable to the general population, who lives, works there, pays taxes and maybe has kids. What they can do is tax all property as if one is renting it, like Switzerland does and use the 6 month median rent as the tax base.

HPsquared 4y ago
If parking money is the problem, I guess an indirect solution would be to give people other places to park their money.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
do the people moving there not pay taxes, work there, and raise kids also? I think I'm missing the point. It's simple to solve it by making foreigners pay much higher annual taxes on the privilege to live there and capping real estate prices for locals vs foreigners. Prevent foreigners from actually being able to buy real estate. Then everyone wins.
- petre 4y ago
  Not really, they're either retired or buying property to park money, like the rich Chinese are doing in Vancouver and Auckland. The issue is that they already bought real estate and drove the prices up, so now is the perfect time to extract taxes from them. The Lisbon downtown is cruise ship territory anyhow, I fully understand why a group of youths was protesting against (those kind of) tourists. They treat every city like it's a theme park.

jseliger 4y ago

Portugal should just do what the U.S. and Canada should also do: built more housing: https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-services-a-huge-economic-opportunity.html https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-service.... It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a particular parcel a hundred years ago.

tffcccdredf 4y ago
_whiteCaps_ 4y ago
I remember travelling to Portugal in the early 2000's and our host describing Portugal's national bird as the (construction) crane. Not sure if the pun translates well to other languages. Are they not still doing that?

vannevar 4y ago

>By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country. Maybe, but only if the increase in wages paid keeps up with the rising rents. And remember that in unregulated capitalism, most of the income from increased economic activity is captured by the wealthiest tiers, with only negligible increases for the vast majority. The rising tide indeed raises all boats, but it raises some boats far more than most. If rent rises 10% but median wages rise only 2%, most people will be losing ground, not gaining.

DrNosferatu 4y ago

I disagree, Portugal does offer something interesting: Cheap labor. In fact, some of the cheapest in the EU - both qualified and non. It even can be said that the current Portuguese Economic Model is intra-EU salary dumping. (and a lot of rent-seeking)

jollybean 4y ago

Instead of selling their land, they can lease it, with a heavy tax on top.

0x457 4y ago
Foreigners buying land there are because it gives them a path to European passport or at very least nearly instant permanent residency. Not because they want to live in Portugal. Portugal requirement is "just" €280,000 which is extremely low - their neighbor's, Spain, requirement is €500,000. Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.