Portugal's Economic Future Takes A Big Step Forward.

July 22, 2011 - PRLog -- Portugal has swallowed the bitter pill of bailout, despite the previous prime minister Socrates making ludicrous statements on how it would be desperately embarrassing for them to do so, just before they agreed to do so. Talk about setting yourself up for a fall, anyone would have thought he had had enough!!

Now they have been given more time to pay at reduced rates.
Exports are rising and imports are shrinking, new partnerships in China Brazil and in a number of African countries are creating a lot of high tech jobs.

A raft of structural reforms aimed at making business in Portugal more attractive. The privatisation and one off windfall taxes imposed by the new government should put a sizeable hole in the countries debt mountain. Read more at http://www.perfectportugalproperty.co.uk

Sounds great; so why is unemployment shooting up and GDP predictions looking mighty gloomy.
Well despite the fact that the rubbish is still collected, the Police still in evidence, town hall still functioning as normally as they ever did and the streets are still kept neat and tidy. They have managed to trim the number of people employed by the tax payer substantially.

The question is what did all these people actually do before hand? Anyone who has ever had dealings in the government offices of Portugal will be able to answer that. Paperwork and lots of it, there is paperwork for everything here and usually the same piece of paper has to go to many departments with a number of small charges tagged to it along the way.
There is little centralisation, especially if you are doing business in Portugal, or you are trying to purchase a property in Portugal. This is all about to change with the closure of a lot of local government offices and a big reduction in red tape.

A sweeping reform of business law is to take place and not before time, the rigidity of the labour market made it nigh on impossible to hire staff that you were not 100% certain about and the social security burden on employers likewise prohibitive.

It is true that there is a low wage economy in Portugal, but that does not mean that it is cheap to employ, it most certainly is not and many company owners spend a lot of time and money conversing with there lawyers over one employment issue or another.

So despite the doom and gloom surrounding the Portuguese economy the right sort of thing does seem to be happening. It is far to soon to be making predictions but I think we will see far better results in terms of GDP in 2012 than is being predicted, maybe not growth but somewhere near 0%.

It may be hard to quantify 0% as optimistic but it is certainly better than the -1.7% currently touted. The reason for this optimism is more global than local, Portugal's business profile is becoming far more international and global growth is about to have a spurt. If you look at the efforts of the Bric governments there biggest problem is cooling their economies and that bodes very well for the future of global growth.

Portugal has one other serious advantage over much of the developed world everybody likes them.

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PPProperty is a registered estate agent in Portugal, they currently have two branches in Central Portugal. PPProperty already advertise property all over Portugal and plan to expand their network of branches when the business climate allows them to do so.