Centeno attributes economic “success” to the improvement of schooling in Portugal – Observer
The governor of Banco de Portugal, Mário Centeno, attributed this Friday the “success” in the country’s economic performance to the improvement in the levels of schooling and education of the Portuguese, which he classified as the “silentest of revolutions”.
In 2022, the Portuguese economy grew more than the European economy, and what the models show us today is that it will continue to do so in the near future. There is one factor that I manage to isolate to justify the success, which is the improvement in the levels of schooling and education of the Portuguese, ”he said.
The former finance minister and current governor of Banco de Portugal was before an audience of around 200 people, mostly students, during an open class that he gave this Friday afternoon at Escola Secundária João de Deus, in Faro, where his father, born in Alcoutim, in the Algarve, did his secondary education.
“Portugal must be proud of itself. We went through the most difficult situation that a country can go through, we successfully overcame it, which, I can assure you here, as an Algarve native, coming from Olhão, is recognized by everyone. Today, everyone recognizes the success that Portugal had in overcoming the immense difficulties we are experiencing”, he said.
Born in Olhão, in 1966, Mário Centeno lived in Vila Real de Santo António throughout his childhood and part of his adolescence, until he was 15, later moving to Lisbon. Governor of Banco de Portugal since July 2020, in economics from Harvard University in 2000 and was finance minister between 2015 and 2020.
It is a country that is currently, perhaps, 50 or 60 years behind other countries, making the most silent of revolutions and that this full auditorium demonstrates, which is schooling. If my father was in this school doing his secondary education many decades ago, very few Portuguese did that at that time”, he recalled.
According to Mário Centeno, if in the year 2000 only four out of 10 Portuguese completed secondary education, a time when Portugal competed with Mexico and Turkey as the countries with the lowest level of schooling in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), today ” there are almost nine out of 10” who complete the 12th grade.
“In just 20 years we have started a transition that will take at least another 20 years to complete“, he declared, then answering questions from people who attend the class, mostly students, from that and other schools, but also teachers.
One of the students asked him if, as a young man, he had ever imagined occupying his current position or being a minister, to which Mário Centeno replied: “If I, when I played football in the Marquês de Pombal square, in Vila Real de Santo António, did you imagine you would be here? The answer is no. I won’t say which club I wanted to win, but those were my concerns”, he joked.
Before the open class, Mário Centeno had met with representatives of the tourism sector at the Faro branch of Banco de Portugal with the aim of listening to the concerns of these entities in relation to the economic outlook.