It really matters why Portugal has an outdated economy. Education has been neglected for generations, thus producing, not only a generally low-skilled labour force, but also a generally incompetent array of politicians. These have been wasting decades of economic rebuild.
The bailout programme was a solid opportunity for the creditors to enforce the economic recovery. EC, IMF and ECB (the troika) had in hands a golden chance to reform the public sector and to enforce progressively higher levels of Education, thus driving the country towards manageable debt levels and placing the seed to a new generation of skilled labour and competitive entrepreneurship.
Alas, the troika has simply applied the short-sighted austerity recipe. If your neighbour is starving don´t give him the fish, instead teach him how to fish. Two badly managed years have produced nothing but austerity, provoking the fading of the population´s goodwill. Just now, the troika is admitting that they should have started with a strong, and also painful, reform of the public sector. It´s never too late, but it hasn´t started yet.
The conclusion has to be a bit pessimistic: how can a pupil be educated by an unskilled master? This crisis just shows that the pupil is lost in translation.
(Letter to the Financial Times)
Raimondi, the sorcerer
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