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Portuguese PM shuns IMF demand for further austerity measures

Xinhua, August 8, 2015 Adjust font size:

Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho shunned Friday the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) warning that the country must introduce additional measures to meet its deficit target.

"We don't see why we should be so pessimistic with the numbers put forward by the IMF. Further measures will not be necessary for the deficit to be below 3 percent," he told journalists in Viseu, around 290 km north of capital Lisbon, according to Portuguese Lusa News Agency, while admitting that the country's austerity efforts had to continue after the general elections.

The IMF, one of the three contributors to the 78-billion-euro (about 86 billion U.S. dollars) bailout the country signed in 2011 to avoid bankruptcy, said on Thursday in its second post-program monitoring report that the country must introduce further measures after the elections to reach its deficit target of 2.7 percent this year.

Passos Coelho argued that the figures released this week by the IMF were out of date, pointing out that the National Institute of Statistics said unemployment currently stood at 11.9 percent while the IMF's document claimed the unemployment rate for Portugal was at 13 percent.

"We are already growing and creating more jobs. There is no reason for us to be as pessimistic as the numbers indicated by the IMF," Passos Coelho said.

While the center-right ruling coalition has been applying severe austerity measures in the past four years to put the economy back on track, the IMF has insisted that further efforts are needed. The country's public debt load stands at almost 130 percent of GDP, according to Eurostat, despite the economy returning to growth last year.

The Portuguese central ruling right coalition faces elections on Oct. 4, with the anti-austerity Socialist Party running neck-and-neck in recent polls. Endit