Portugal's Economy is Heading for a Steady-State

Oct 22, 2026 Cost of living protests hit Belgium, Italy, Portugal and France Hundreds of thousands of Europeans have taken to the streets in separate, uncoordinated demonstrations to protest against the rising cost of living in their countries.

In a prior post (here), I reviewed an journalistic article from the Atlantic (here) that tried to understand the puzzle of Portugal's economy using a sampling of conventional wisdom from macroeconomic analysis. One of the articles mentioned in the piece was published by the prestigious Brookings Institution and written by Prof. Ricardo Reis of Columbia University (here). It provides a more in depth, academic, macro-economic analysis that is worth some careful reading. The graph above is taken from earlier post and annotated with various historical fictions about the economy of Portugal from A-E. I will refer to each fiction in the discussion below.