After a timid approach to European partners, the standard of living of the Portuguese was in 2013, 25% below the EU average, as it was in 1990, study reveals “Three Decades of European Portugal”

The document, coordinated by economist Augusto Mateus Foundation and commissioned by Francisco Manuel dos Santos, will be presented today and updates an earlier study (“25 years of European Portugal”) for the years 2011-2013, the first years of the ‘troika’ in Portugal, covering all the programming cycles of EU funding since Portugal joined the European Economic Community (EEC) (1989-1993, 1994-1999, 2000-2006 and 2007-2013).

According to the report, the “European Portugal passed a route convergence, concentrated in the years following accession to the EEC and in the second half of the 90s and more intense in terms of household consumption, to a process of visible divergence”. In the current European panorama, Portugal is included in a second convergence level, composed of countries with a standard of living 20 to 30% below the European standard, which are also countries like Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Greece and Estonia, says the study, indicating that since 1999, only Portugal approached the European average in 2005 and 2009.

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