The goal of Portugal is to make it into the top ten of business investment friendly countries, Economy Minister Álvaro Santos Pereira told the Official Forum of Monetary and Financial Institutions.
Getting the country more business friendly involved being “swifter to act and less bureaucratic” said Pereira who then announced Portugal would be seeking to implement the British coalition government’s policy of ensuring one regulation is eliminated for every new regulation introduced.
Among the other issues included in the minister’s speech were the progress already made in terms of the privatisation programme as well as reform of the transport, energy and labour markets while promising that a review of Portugal’s corporate tax system was under way.
Indeed, among the specific references were the recently announced deep water port for Lisbon and subsequent tourism-friendly redevelopment of the existing facilities as well as a big shout out to the minerals sector.
Minister Pereira put the value of Portuguese deposits of gold, iron ore, copper and wolfram at between €170 billion and €250 billion in addition to ongoing prospecting for oil and gas and promised "hundreds of millions of euros of investment would be going into this area.”
The minister gave his speech on the same day President Aníbal Cavaco Silva told an audience of young entrepreneurs that they had to drive “a renewed dynamic of growth.”
The president told a 50-strong group of young entrepreneurs that they had to turn their back on the idea that “low wages were the guarantee of competitiveness” and seek “new means of thinking and acting (…) with ambition, energy and audaciousness".
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