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EUROPEAN UNION: Portugal Holding Firm in Last Spot
By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Jan 8 (IPS) - Despite the campaign promises made nearly two years
ago by Portuguese Prime Minister José Manuel Durao Barroso, this South
European country remains firmly in last spot in the European Union (EU)
line-up.
In his March 2002 political campaign, Durao Barroso said he would put
Portugal in the group of the most advanced EU countries within a decade. But
the bloc's year-end economic, social and human development indicators show
that no progress has been made in that direction.
In 2003, the conservative prime minister's second year in office, the
Portuguese economy shrank 1.1 percent, allowing Greece to overtake Portugal,
which was relegated to the last spot in the EU - a position that Greece
occupied from 1986 to 2001, and which it shared with Portugal in 2002.
But what is most worrying, in the view of EU affairs analyst Isabel
Arriaga e Cunha, is that ''in 1999, Greece's Gross Domestic Product stood at
65 percent of the EU average, and Portugal's at 70 percent, which means that
between 1999 and 2002, Greece advanced six percentage points, and Portugal
only one.''
With respect to inflation and unemployment, Portugal posted the biggest
increases in the bloc. Consumer prices grew 4.4 percent in Portugal,
compared to the EU average of 1.8 percent.
And unemployment in Portugal, which has traditionally enjoyed one of the
lowest rates in the bloc, rose from 4.1 percent in 2002 to 7.2 percent in
2003, close to the EU average.
In terms of social justice, no headway was made, to judge by the fact
that Portugal offers the highest salaries for executives and the lowest
wages for workers in the 15-member EU, which is also made up of Austria,
Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Portugal's minimum monthly salary of 356 euros (around 440 dollars) is
just 60 percent of that of Greece, while the average monthly wage paid in
industry, 828 euros (some 1,030 dollars), amounts to 59 percent of the
average industrial monthly wage in Spain, 53 percent of that of France, half
of that of Ireland, Sweden or Italy, and 34 percent of that of Denmark.
At the same time, directors of public enterprises in Portugal earn up to
three times the salary drawn by their counterparts in Spain or France, and a
''star'' journalist on public TV earns four times the salary of the most
famous news anchor on Italy's RAI radio and TV network.
But the marked inequalities, which are more pronounced than anywhere else
in the EU, cannot only be blamed on the ruling coalition made up of the
Social Democratic Party (PSD) - conservative despite its name - and the
right-wing Social Democratic Centre/Popular Party (CDS/PP).
Former socialist leader Antonio Guterres, who governed from 1995 to 2002,
did little to change what economic analysts frequently refer to as the
country's ''Latin America-style'' gap between rich and poor, which is also
reflected in other comparisons with the rest of the EU, such as the number
of hours worked, and access to public health, education and culture.
The Portuguese work an average of 1,730 hours a year, compared to 1,620
in the rest of the EU.
In public hospitals, people sit on waiting lists for up to six years for
surgery. And due to the high rates charged by dentists, only 35 percent of
Portugal's 11 million people have ever gotten a tooth fixed.
The European Commission's ''Employment in Europe'' report states that 20
percent of the population of Portugal has health problems, compared to the
EU average of 10 percent, while Portugal has the highest levels of
rheumatism, hypertension and diabetes.
Press reports have also pointed to a number of areas in which Portugal
is, unfortunately, the leader in Europe.
For example, this country ranks first in the EU in terms of the number of
people killed in traffic accidents, and in the proportion of work-related
accidents, of which Portugal has 7,214 per 100,000 population, compared to
the EU average of 4,450.
Portugal is also the EU champion in consumption of soft drugs, the AIDS
rate, and cases of police brutality against people in custody, which has
kept the country on the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International's
black list.
Illiteracy still stands at 11.8 percent. But perhaps even more worrying
is the fact that 48 percent of the population is deemed functionally
illiterate - more than double the next highest rate in the EU, 21 percent,
found in Britain.
Consulted by IPS on the discouraging statistics, film and theatre
director José Fonseca e Costa responded with irony that Portugal ''had
already touched bottom, but it was a false bottom. Now we are still falling,
we don't know how far, until we really hit bottom.''
Several studies carried out in the EU show that the cultural level of a
country's population is directly related to its future outlook for economic,
social and human development.
That indicates that with the admission of 10 new EU member countries next
May, Portugal will find itself in an even worse position in the bloc.
Cyprus will enter the EU in a better position than Greece or Portugal,
with per capita GDP equivalent to 76 percent of the EU average, while Malta
is at the same level as Greece and Portugal (70 percent), and Slovenia (69
percent) is on their heels.
The remaining seven have per capita GDP equivalent to 35 percent of the
EU average, in the case of Latvia, 39 percent for Lithuania, 40 percent
Estonia, 41 percent Poland, 47 percent Slovakia, 53 percent Hungary and 62
percent for the Czech Republic.
According to Economy Professor René Afonso, the admission of the former
socialist countries of eastern Europe ''will represent a big setback for the
least developed EU countries, due to the foreign investment that the new
members will draw, their near-zero illiteracy rates, vast access to culture,
and solid technical training, which will enable them to quickly increase
their productivity.''
(END/2004)
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