Economy

The Portuguese economy is an open market economy strongly marked by its integration in the European Union, the Single Market and the European Monetary System. Making part of this zone of stability and prosperity has been very important for Portugal so as to overcome and make part of the globalization challenges, promoting its business sector by internationalization, as well as the creation of a favourable environment for foreign direct investment in all those activities of high added value.

Still depending on those fluctuations typical to the international economic context, and as it is common to any open economy, Portuguese economy has recently been giving signals of maturity, allowing the country to overcome, similarly to what happened in Japan, some more adverse situations.

With an economic development perspective of around 2%, for the present year; an effective containment programme in what concerns public expenses; great stability at monetary and interest rates levels; low unemployment, a legal frame favouring the day-to-day business activity; efficient social policies and correct bets for the future, Portugal will continue to be a country economically reliable and where it is worth betting and investing.

Being one of the European countries with the best performance on providing online public services; covering the access to internet broadband all over the country; simplifying day-to-day the administrative processes in such a way that presently the average time to create an enterprise in Portugal is approximately 59 minutes, our country has taken advantage of the technological development and bets on its consolidation. Programmes such as MIT-Portugal – through which the recognised Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Portuguese universities, will develop training and research programmes in areas such as Conception Engineering and Advanced Systems of Industrial Production; Energy Systems; Transport Systems; Bio-Engineering Systems; as well as a PhD Seminar Programme entitled “Lisbon-Sloan Seminar Series in Management Science” –are significant examples of our country today and in the future.