“Since the beginning of the year, the number of companies that have opened is higher than those that have closed, thus Portugal has been able to create more jobs than those that have been destroyed”.
This guarantee came from Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho during a visit to the S. Mateus fair in Viseu last week.
The head of the government was approached many times by concerned locals who voiced their worries about unemployment and closing businesses.
“Don’t let so many companies close down. Put a stop to it, people are dying of hunger,” said one.
His answer was always the same – Portugal is on the road to recovery, with more companies opening than those that are closing, and shrinking unemployment statistics.
All the same, at the end of the visit Passos Coelho did admit that unemployment is still a major problem in Portugal.
His preference nonetheless was to shine the spotlight on countries that are in an even worse situation. Spain, for instance, with its 25% unemployment rate and Greece “which can’t seem to bring down unemployment from 26%”.
“We (Portugal) are reducing unemployment,” the prime minister stressed, admitting many had been forced to leave the country because they could not find a job.
Passos Coelho asked people not to lose hope, because things “are improving”.
“When a wave of pessimism is created, people sometimes drown in it and we have the obligation to keep people’s hope up that things are changing when they in fact are improving,” he said.
Second biggest increase in employment
The truth is that there are signs of improvement, according to Eurostat data.
The European Union’s statistical office says that Portugal registered the second biggest increase in employment (+0.9%) in the EU when comparing the second quarter of 2014 to the first.
However, this follows two consecutive drops (-0.1% in the last trimester of 2013 and -0.3% in the first of 2014).
Estonia was the only country that registered a bigger boost to employment (+1.2%).
Europe’s economic giant Germany saw a 0.2% rise, while Lithuania (-1%) and Cyprus (-0.1%) were the only two countries to register a fall.
Overall, employment grew by 0.4% in the eurozone and 0.7% in the EU.
Eurostat estimates that, in the second quarter of 2014, 146.5 million men and women were employed in the eurozone while 224.9 million were in the EU.
