A concerned note pervades a report from Reuters today which looks at Portugal’s ‘brain drain’ that has resulted from the exodus of hundreds of thousands of its most able and mobile workers.
With just days to go before the country goes to the polls, emigration has become a campaign issue in the neck-and-neck race for power over a dwindling number of taxpayers.
Antonio Costa’s socialist party aims to lure the talented evacuees back to the homeland but with unemployment marginally on the rise again and anyway above 12%, he will have an uphill struggle.
A total of 485,000 people left Portugal between 2011 and 2014, including 200,000 as known permanent emigrants, with most aged 30 or under, according to official data quoted by the news service.
After years of net immigration to Portugal, EU data shows that the trend reversed as from 2010.
Famously in 2011, a government minister suggested people should go abroad to find work if there was none available at home. The socialist opposition has quoted this slip with unerring regularity but has little concrete to offer returnees who have got used to earning 200-300% more for the equivalent job overseas with better prospects.
The ruling coalition is not interested in people coming home. The one government programme announced offers incentives to just 20 lucky returnees to be picked in 2016 based on their ability to write a good business plan.
The brain drain screws the economy way into the future as a generation of taxpayers will be absent, putting additional pressure on those remaining to support an ever-increasingly elderly population dependent of state pensions.
Quoted by Reuters, Luisa Cerdeira, economics professor at Lisbon University and one of the authors of a new study said, "The country has thrown away 10 years' worth of public investment in higher education," with an estimated €11 billion of benefits accruing to other countries from those Portuguese educated at the taxpayers’ expense in Portugal.
