According to Eurico Brilhante Dias, the country "has sufficient demand to contract until the end of the year what it contracted in 2020, 2019 and 2018".

"The year 2021, as a whole, can be the equivalent of the three previous years", underlined the government official, in an intervention at the conference "Exports & Investment", promoted by AICEP.

According to the Secretary of State, if Portugal complied with all the investors on the list contracted by 31 December, "we could reach €3 billion in contracts".

"It means that, alongside this movement, foreign direct investment (FDI) in stock in the country reached, for the first time, in 2020, 75 percent of GDP, which is an all-time record", he stressed.

Although GDP declined in 2020, Eurico Brilhante Dias stated that this year GDP has already reached 75.1 percent in the first half of the year, it continues to grow, “which means that the FDI flow and the FDI stock are growing, allowing to continue to have more weight of foreign direct investment”.

The Secretary of State for Internationalisation considers that “foreign capital is decisive for the virtuous cycle between investment and exports”.

“If Portugal grew between 2017-2019 above the European Union average, it owes much to the attraction of exports to attract foreign direct investment”, he stressed.

At the AICEP conference, the president of the National Commission for Monitoring the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), António Costa Silva, warned that Portugal has lost the “collective link of working with each other”, which can be “lethal” for the future of the country.

António Costa Silva said that Portugal needs to pay close attention to the international context, with an increase in the cost of production goods, energy and disruption of logistical chains.

“The last thing we needed was for the implementation of the PRR and Portugal 2030 to be profoundly affected by these effects of the international context that we cannot escape from”, he said.

The chairman of the National Monitoring Commission also warned of the internal problem of the Portuguese economy, which in the 20 years of the 21st century was stagnant “and remains stagnant”.

“In these 20 years, our GDP per capita, if we compare it with the average level in the European Union, has fluctuated 30 to 40 percent below the European average”, he said in his speech.