Vivam,
Na sequência de agumas mensagens que aqui têm passado nos últimos dias, penso que vale a pena ler esta (original em
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21825):
EUROPEAN UNION:
Portugal Holding Firm in Last Spot
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)
Enviado: 20/1/2004 13:33
), e é com base nela que estudo o futuro possível para as "minhas" empresas...
