Bernardo Blanco: Portugal is the “4th country in the Eurozone with the lowest purchasing power”

In the session of political declarations, which took place this afternoon in the Assembly of the Republic and which prompted several questions to the Executive of António Costa and the Socialist Party, the deputy from the Liberal Initiative, Bernardo Blancobegan by mentioning a series of data on the performance of the Government in recent years:

“Portugal has 4.4 million people in poverty, 1.7 million after social transfers. At the current pace, we are not going to reduce the poverty rate to 10% by 2030. The first question is: how does the PS think to accelerate the rate of reduction that has been happening to go up to 10%? Second question: Portugal is the second country in the European Union with the most people living in housing with poor conditions. One in four houses. What does the PS also propose to reduce this number? Thirdly, we are the fourth country with the lowest purchasing power in the Euro Zone.”

Furthermore, added the deputy who also wanted to know how the Government was going to get out of this position, “the Portuguese have lost purchasing power this year [2022]”. We verify if Portugal is, in fact, in the fourth position at the ranking from Eurozone countries with less purchasing power.

The most recent data refer to December 15, when the National Institute of Statistics (INE) had published the bulletin on “Purchasing Power Parities”, highlighting then that “the gross domestic product per capitaexpressed in Purchasing Power Paritiesstood at 75.1% of the European Union average in 2021, lower value by 1.1 percentage points (pp) to registered in 2020 (76.2%). Portugal thus occupied the 16th position among the 19 countries of the Euro Zone and the 20th of the European Union“. In other words, the fourth worst in the Euro Zone, as Bernando Blanco said.

“Individual Consumption Expenditure per capitawhich is a more appropriate indicator to reflect the well-being of familiesfixed on 83.6% of the European Union average, 0.3 pp bottom compared to the previous year (83.9%), ranking 14th in the Euro Zone and 19th in the European Union”, INE reported in the same bulletin.

“Considering the values ​​sorted in descending order [no Gráfico 1]there is a high dispersion of the GDPpc volume indicator measured in PPP in the 27 Member States of the European Union. THE Luxembourg (268.5) presents the highest index among the 36 countries included in this analysis, corresponding to more than two and a half times the EU27 average and almost five times higher than that of Bulgaria (57.5), the European Union country with the lowest value“, it details.