reminder about tomorrow’s event – all welcome.
Address by Vitor Gaspar “Adjusting in the euro area: the Portuguese case”
Date: Thursday, 11th April
Time: 9am – 10am
Venue: The Thomas Davis Theatre, Room 2043, Ground Floor Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Portugal’s Finance Minister Vitor Gaspar will deliver an address on “Adjusting in the euro area: the Portuguese case” at 9am on Thursday April 11. The lecture will be followed by a Q+A session.
Prior to his current position, Mr Gaspar had a distinguished economics career at the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the Central Bank of Portugal.
One reply on “Reminder: Gaspar Lecture, TCD, 9am tomorrow”
Alas cannot attend.
I do hope he is asked about one of the nastiest impacts of euro adjustment and its tool of austerity – the collapse in Portuguese birth rates.
In order for families to have kids they need economic stability, they need support, not simply financial but social – affordable childcare, child friendly company policies, any any number of imaginative ways which mean a family can have a second or third child if they so wish. Throwing money at the problem while retaining archaic attitudes and child unfriendly approaches cleary wont work a la Germany.
For Portugal the decline in child rates can be seen to have begun a precipitous decline year by year beginning at the start of the crisis.
Will Mr. Gaspar talk the chance to explain how birth rates can be boosted, and implicitly a more social Portugal can be created, as part of the adjustment.
The Thatcherite solution of bringing in non-Portuguese to avoid having to put in place childcare, and a progressive society for men and women might be the preferred solution, as it has been elsewhere bar Scandinavia, but with Thatcher dead maybe Portugal can explain how they intend to bury her policies as well in favor of a more social Europe