When we talk about European funds, there are two indicators that should be taught in Portuguese schools. A kind of warning about what a country of our size, geographical and population, aspires to be.
The first is an absolute value: 157 billion euros. This is what Portugal, as a cohesion country, received from 1986 until 2022 in successive community support frameworks. Just so we don’t get lost in the immensity of numbers, this value is almost equivalent to everything our economy produced in 2005. It wasn’t that long ago.
In other words, since we have been integrated into the European community and until the end of 2022, Portugal has received an average of 11.5 million euros per day from taxpayers in other Member States.
The second indicator is more recent. It is from the European Court of Auditors and points out that 90% of Portuguese public investment between 2014 and 2020 was ensured by cohesion funds. In other words, nine out of ten euros were guaranteed by European funds.
The development of the Portuguese economy and the country since joining the European Union (at the beginning of the EEC) is undeniable. The national GDP went from 28 billion to 289 billion between 1986 and 2024, multiplying tenfold. Portugal modernized infrastructure, digitized itself, transferred practically all of its energy production to green sources (such as wind, solar and water), made enormous leaps in the modernization of sectors such as textiles, footwear, wine and others. It has become a producer of talent in sectors such as software and, we now see, also in Defense.
But did you do everything you could? How did you spend the 11.6 million euros a day? What efforts did it make to stop being a cohesion country (i.e., a recipient of funds) and become a country that contributes its wealth to the next countries to join? Is this a goal or not really? We have not done enough work on this assessment. That’s why we continue to measure success in this field by the funds’ execution capacity. If the Portuguese State captures 95% (which it did not do) of what was available in the PRR (Recovery and Resilience Plan) it is a success. Even when it does so by submitting projects that are poorly designed or of dubious effectiveness. Only when you are unable to secure the entire check or close to it do the warning bells ring.
Not a word about how many euros each of the euros put into the projects generated. In the next community framework, projects are recycled and the “circle of life” repeats itself.
Today DN writes in a headline that the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ delays in submitting projects under the PRR mean that Portugal will no longer have 30 million euros from the PRR for the construction of two immigrant installation centers. These are projects that have already been announced several times and may now be at risk.
Last week we had read something similar for PRR projects in Health (a sector that, in fact, is doing so well that it can do without them), and previously regarding lost support to modernize metro or train lines.
The fact that projects like these suffer delays because the State will try to fit them into the regular multi-annual framework, Portugal2030, shows how our country has the needle of European funds firmly in its grasp. How do psychologists tell drug addicts and their families? First you need to recognize that there is a problem.