«Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates has a fresh chance to show he’s heeded the lesson of Greece’s fiscal crisis after disappointing bondholders with his 2010 budget. As soon as this week, his government is due to explain to the European Commission how it will honor a pledge to cut the budget deficit to within the European Union’s limit of 3 percent of output in 2013, from 9.3 percent last year. Postponing the bulk of that effort, Portugal plans to trim the shortfall by 1 percentage point this year as it banks on faster growth than forecast by the International Monetary Fund. “People are increasingly worried about how on earth this is going to be achieved,” said Phyllis Reed, London-based head of bond research at Kleinwort Benson, which manages $32 billion of assets. “Whether Portugal will be able to grow at all this year is really debatable.” Socrates’s challenge is compounded by his government’s lack of a parliamentary majority and an economy that has barely grown in the last decade. Failure to ease investor concern may spark a further plunge in government bonds and worsen a European crisis that’s undermining the euro.»
«The budget includes a 2010 growth forecast of 0.7 percent, compared with the IMF’s 0.4 percent forecast. The Washington- based lender sees the economy expanding 0.9 percent in 2011 and 1.3 percent in 2012, periods for which the government hasn’t yet given forecasts. Portugal has one of the euro area’s largest private debt burdens, according to data from the European Central Bank. It has also lost competitiveness since joining the euro, with labor costs rising an average 3.5 percent a year in the last decade compared with 2.3 percent in Germany. “We know about all these problems,” said Luigi Speranza, an economist at BNP Paribas SA in London. “The question is, what are they going to do about it?” »
Ora esta aí uma pergunta que eu gostava de ver respondida.