In this recent ranking the well reputed magazine The Economist attributed this title to the Portuguese economy to the wonder of some, including the equally well reputed academic economist Fernando Freire de Sousa.
Let’s begin with the trigger of this dispute:
“This aggregate performance conceals wide variation. So for the fifth year in a row, we have searched for the “economy of the year”. We have compiled data on five indicators—inflation, “inflation breadth”, GDP, jobs and stock market performance—for 36 mostly rich countries. We have ranked them according to how well they have done on each measure, creating an overall score of economic success in 2025. The table below shows our rankings.” “After Spain’s victory last year, Portugal is our best-performing economy this time round. In 2025 it has combined strong GDP growth, low inflation and a buoyant stock market.” (Which economy did best in 2025. Muito Bom. The Year in Review, in The Economist December 13 on paper and December 7 online, 2025)
Fernando Freire de Sousa reacted in the January 30, 2026 issue of the weekly newspaper Expresso with a long piece, “Quando os primeiros podem ser últimos” (“When the first may be last”, own translation), where he expressed a motion of censure to The Economist: how could such a backward economy as the Portuguese one be selected as the bast performing in 2025?
Based on an update of some of the many data collected in his co-authored book (“Balada da Média Virtude”. Outras hipóteses para a economia portuguesa”, by Fernando Freire de Sousa, Guilherme Costa & Rui Moreira, Ideias de Ler, Porto, 2021), he comes up with several rankings reproduced below, that he summarizes in the next one entitled “Difference between the Economist’s ranking and the ranking with indicators of the economic conjuncture”, where he spots one of the greatest negative discrepancies applying to Portugal.
In two of these seven tables you may identify the word structure on the title, and from all of them you may associate a lot more with structural than with conjunctural issues.
I suspect that this confusion of the short with the long term (conjunctural with structural) situation/ranking of the Portuguese economy stems from the intrinsically negative/pessimistic attitude of many Portuguese academic intellectuals towards their home country. This hypothesis seems to be supported by some of the comments on that piece of the Expresso weekly newspaper. Why should one compare a one-year excellent performance by the Portuguese economy with the century-old backwardness of it, as shown below? Even more so, as this may be part of the recently recognized “Europe’s resurgent peripheral economies”, namely the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), as featured in the February 20, 2026, issue of the Financial Times.
On this issue you may also check respective chapter of this book/blog of mine: “The Causes of Portugal’s Backwardness”.
