Portugal

Portugal is at the forefront of Europe’s latest baby bust, one that is shorting the fuse on a time bomb of social costs in some of the world’s most rapidly aging societies, The Washington Post reported. As in many corners of the industrialized world, Europe has faced a gradual decline in birthrates since the 1960s. But in a number of the region’s hardest-hit countries, a modest rebound during the 2000s — when European governments welcomed immigrants and rolled out cash benefits for young couples starting families — has now gone into reverse.
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Less than a year before European leaders hope to chalk up success for their handling of the sovereign debt crises in Ireland and Portugal, rising bond yields and long-term interest rates are causing concern over how the two countries will exit their bailout programmes, the Financial Times reported. Amid expectations that central banks in the US, Japan and elsewhere will tighten monetary policy, yields on Portugal’s benchmark 10-year bonds surged to 6.6 per cent last week from a low of 5.2 per cent in late May.
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The Portuguese government confirmed Thursday that it will impose spending ceilings on all ministries, cut public-private partnership contracts and increase working hours in the public sector to save on overtime pay to meet a budget-deficit target of 5.5% of gross domestic product this year, The Wall Street Journal reported. "Like we have promised, there won't be [new] tax increases," government spokesman Luis Marques Guedes said following a meeting where ministers approved changes to the original budget plan for 2013. Mr.
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Portugal’s top bankers have called on Europe’s leaders to stop “playing with fire” and moderate their stance towards the eurozone periphery, or risk instilling alarm among bank depositors in future. In separate interviews, the heads of the country’s two biggest banks – Millennium BCP and Banco Espírito Santo – said they were concerned that the precedent set by Europe’s treatment of Cyprus’s recent troubles had increased nervousness across the eurozone to dangerous levels. “Leaders need to moderate their language.
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Portugal's government said on Sunday its EU and IMF lenders had concluded work on the latest bailout review, indicating there were no outstanding obstacles for Lisbon to receive the next 2 billion euro tranche of the rescue package, Reuters reported. The review, which had been practically sealed in March, hit a snag early last month when the constitutional court threw out some of this year's austerity measures. But the government presented a plan to compensate for those, along with wider deficit reduction steps until 2015 worth 4.8 billion euros.
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Bailed-out Portugal added to the unemployment woes of southern Europe on Thursday as the country's jobless rate hit a startling 18% of the working population, The Guardian reported. The first quarter figures from the national statistics institute revealed that youth unemployment had soared even higher, with 43% of the under 25s who are not studying now unable to find work. "It is a dramatic and brutal increase," said Helena Pinto, a deputy for the Left Bloc party, who also pointed to a leap in emigration by people desperate to find work.
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Inspectors from Portugal's bailout creditors are returning to Lisbon to assess whether the government's latest austerity measures merit unblocking a due disbursement of rescue funds, the Associated Press reported. Portugal's 78 billion euro ($102 billion) bailout two years ago spared the country from bankruptcy, but in return it must slash spending and debt. In what was seen as a warning over lack of compliance, the bailout lenders last month halted payouts after Portugal's Constitutional Court disallowed some of the government's pay and pension cuts.
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Portugal plans to avoid the threat of needing another bailout by making another 4.8 billion euros ($6.3 billion) in cuts over the next three years, with measures including raising the retirement age by one year to 66 and laying off around 30,000 government workers, the prime minister said Friday, the Associated Press reported. Pedro Passos Coelho announced the proposals in a prime-time televised address to the nation. Portugal received a 78 billion euro rescue in 2011 after overspending, heavy debts and weak growth left it close to bankruptcy amid the eurozone's financial crisis.
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Lisbon is to take court action against JPMorgan and Spain’s Banco Santander over what it says were “toxic” derivatives sold to public sector companies, the Financial Times reported. The move is part of a government effort to stem potential losses of up to €3bn from complex hedging products. The allegations in Portugal are similar to cases in Italy, where a court convicted banks of mis-selling derivatives, and the UK, where the “big four” banks have been ordered to review their selling of interest-rate swap contracts.
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Portugal's government plans to lower company tax rates "significantly" as part of a wider plan of incentives to drag the economy out of its worst recession since the 1970s, economy minister Alvaro Santos Pereira said, the Irish Times reported. He also promised to step up the financing of the economy by state-owned bank CGD that will provide €1 billion euros this year and €2.5 billion in 2014, and later to create a development bank to boost such funding further, especially for exports-oriented small and medium-sized companies.
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