O António Maria: FMI repensa Portugal

quinta-feira, janeiro 10, 2013

FMI repensa Portugal

O conteúdo deste relatório não é novo. Só a algazarra é.

Nem tanto ao mar, nem tanto à terra!

A democracia não acabou com o Estado Corporativo, aumentou-o, engordou-o até à insustentabilidade, e conduziu o país, crescentemente falido, até à insolvência. No fundo, os partidos políticos populistas limitaram-se a substituir o ditador, sem realmente permitir a libertação efetiva da sociedade civil e conservando para seu sustento institucional a mesma base burocrática de apoio. Corrigir esta situação será sempre uma metamorfose dolorosa. Mas os que mais vociferam e encharcam a comunicação de propaganda demagógica são, afinal, os principais beneficiários do regime e os que maior inércia opõem à mudança.

O diagnóstico está feito. Embora a cada dia que passa os gráficos revelem claramente quem ganhou e quem perdeu nas quase quatro décadas que se seguiram ao colapso da ditadura.

A transição necessária pode resumir-se assim: passar de um Estado demasiado grande, caro e ineficiente para um Estado mais ágil e eficiente que consuma menos recursos essenciais ao crescimento económico produtivo, e que assegure a solidariedade entre gerações, aproxime os níveis de rendimento entre os setores público e privado, e promova um ambiente de equidade fiscal favorável à criação de emprego, especialmente entre os jovem dos 16 aos 35 anos.

Sem isto, para começar, será difícil inverter o declínio acelerado da economia e a insustentabilidade patente das finanças públicas. Deixar que este binómio se degrade ainda mais é convocar, outra vez, os demónios do passado.

Sem classes médias não há democracia que resista, mas para que estas não morram é preciso travar a hipertrofia burocrática do Estado, e é urgente bloquear a manutenção e reprodução alargada das elites financeiras, económicas e burocráticas protegidas e eternamente aninhadas nas receitas dos orçamentos públicos, cujo egoísmo, nomeadamente em relação aos mais velhos e desprotegidos, bem como em relação às gerações mais jovens, é escandaloso e cada vez mais intolerável.

O estudo do FMI encomendado pelo governo e ontem mal divulgado com a fanfarra mediática do costume não traz nada de novo relativamente ao que o governo tem vindo a revelar às pinguinhas. A análise é clara, os quadros e gráficos são muito reveladores, e, por fim, o menu de soluções define um quadro razoável de alternativas aberto à discussão pública. O principal, do ponto de vista da cidadania, é evitar que os paquidermes do regime, uma vez mais, intoxiquem o debate e acabem por matá-lo sob a sua omnipresença mediática. Sintomaticamente, nem o governo, nem o parlamento se deram à módica despesa de traduzir o documento que incendiou as hostes partidárias.

Seguem-se alguns destaques, gráficos e, por fim, o documento completo.

[NOTA: ver tradução da no fim deste post]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

“While big governments have usually been linked to lower growth, they do not necessarily generate worse outcomes. The focus of expenditure reform should be on improving equity and efficiency in the process of achieving certain outcomes. Better equity (e.g., through improved targeting) and better efficiency (e.g., through reduced spending) can often go hand-in-hand, and, together, they lay the foundations for achieving a more robust economic growth, sound public finances, and an exit from the crisis.”

[...]

“Its goal is to increase spending efficiency and equity, while safeguarding social cohesion and strengthening the sustainability of the welfare state.”

[...]

“The government’s spending reduction target can only be achieved by focusing on major budget items, particularly the government wage bill and pension spending. Together, these two items account for 24 percent of GDP and 58 percent of non-interest government spending. It would seem impossible to generate the government’s spending reduction goals without changes in these two areas, and relevant related reforms should take priority.

Reforms related to the wage bill should target areas that promise potentially large efficiency gains and budget savings. Over-employment is of concern in the education sector, the security forces, and with respect to workers with little formal training, while high overtime pay (for doctors) is of concern in the health sector. Other reforms are also important for modernizing the state (e.g., compensation and contract structures to better attract talent, equity between public and private sector employment by reducing the public wage premium, and labor mobility in and out of the public sector), but can be given lower priority in the near term.”

[...]

“Merging the CGA and GCR administrations could provide a strong initial signal toward achieving greater equity.

Various pension reforms would deliver the desired savings, but only accelerating the transition to the new system and modifying entitlements will address existing inequities. A series of incremental reforms of the pension system could manage to deliver the savings desired by the government, but would fail to correct existing inequities. A faster transition to the new pension system (for example, by equalizing the pension formula for all workers including for people who entered into the CGA regime before 1993), and/or a modification of existing rights (for example, by applying a sustainability factor to all pensions) would be needed to correct the existing intergenerational and cross-occupational inequities.”

[...]

“An efficient and effective state enables and empowers its citizens to handle the demands of the global economy. In many countries, the state has moved away from being a provider of services (or the sole provider of services) and toward being a setter and enforcer of service standards, while service provision itself is handled by the private sector. Seeing the state as an activator or enabler has important implications in many areas. Taking education as an example, and notwithstanding recent reforms, the Portuguese state still attempts to do (almost) everything: it provides education, sets standards, evaluates (its own) performance, and enforces standards. Yet, the state has been falling behind in providing quality education: of the 50 top schools, 44 are private, 4 are charter schools, and only 2 are public schools.”

[...]

“Public sector pay and employment policies need to emphasize competitiveness and providing value for money to the population. A modern enabling state needs to be on par with the private sector in the way it operates—it cannot be seen as sheltering privileges for itself, either in the form of employment conditions or remuneration. International experience is not encouraging: on aggregate, public sector jobs pay too much.

The reform of public sector pay and employment can boost economic growth by helping reduce private sector labor costs.

Public sector employment may be reduced in some areas where it seems too high to produce required outputs. The public sector pay premium should be reduced, particularly for jobs that do not require advanced skills, and options should be considered for rewarding the acquisition of new skills and the achievement of good results and outcomes.”

[...]

EQUITY AND SOCIAL COHESION

[...]

“Portugal’s social protection system could do better in mitigating inequalities. The operation of the contributory social protection system reflects the logic of insiders and outsiders and serves to reinforce the gap between rich and poor. In contrast to many other OECD and EU countries, Portugal’s social transfers provide more benefits to upper income groups than to lower income groups, aggravating inequality. Particularly in times of fiscal distress and growing concerns about social cohesion, a regressive social protection system looks less and less sustainable both economically and conceptually.

Government spending must be focused where it is most needed and where it will have most results. Effective states set clear priorities and pursue them with focused interventions. Compared to the time when welfare states were founded, the overall level of and prosperity of society is much greater. At the same time, inclusion problems faced by the poor are often more intractable. Limited resources will go a longer way if they prioritize help to the bottom of the income distribution, while the remainder of the population, far from being abandoned, is being provided with the tools to help themselves. In this way, an intervention of a given size is magnified and targeted.”

[...]

“Successful targeting of state interventions requires improvements in public sector governance. For focused interventions to work, the needs of individuals and families must be assessed transparently and simply. A good social policy requires effective information processing and efficient interactions with individuals and businesses. For example, taxes need to be payable and benefits receivable electronically. Public services need to be subjected to transparent performance monitoring, using outcome-based indicators and league tables that compare performance.

The enabling state must also pay more attention to the needs of the young. The existing Portuguese welfare system emphasizes life-long accrual of age-related entitlements. The priority given to older people reflected an expectation of sustained growth, high employment, and limited migration, which have now been disproved. The problems faced by the young—both in entering the labor force and in facing greater income and employment insecurity once they get there—imply a growing distance between those entering the labor market and the more mature population. The issue of intergenerational equity is already important but is likely to increase dramatically in the next decade. The state should thus place greater emphasis on interventions affecting young people’s earning capacity (e.g., specific education interventions), and should temper age-related social protection demands and spending, most notably by promoting active ageing.”

[...]

MACROECONOMIC CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

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“To achieve fiscal sustainability, the government sees a need to reduce spending by about €4 billion (about 2.4 percent of GDP) by 2014; about €0.8 billion of these should be put in place already in 2013.”

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PENSIONS / Background

[...]

“Portugal currently spends about 14½ percent of GDP in all of its public pension programs.

Among the advanced economies, this is one of the largest shares of GDP devoted to pension spending.”

[...]

“Portugal’s public pension system does not protect adequately against old-age poverty and remains inequitable.”

[...]

“High pension spending and high elderly poverty are reflective of an inequitable system, where 40 percent of old age pension spending is received by the top quintile in the income distribution [...]. This suggests that there may be room to reevaluate benefits without compromising equity goals.” [...]

“The pension system is not equitable. Workers in the civil service and workers in the private sector receive vastly different pensions. Civil servants, who account for about 15 percent of all retirees, receive 35 percent of all pension spending. The average old-age pension in the CGA (€16,052 per year) is nearly three times higher than the average old-age pension in the GCR (€5,515 per year). The differences in average pensions significantly exceed the differences in average earnings (€1,800 vs. €700 per month). This suggests that civil service pensions carry a premium of about 15 percent relative to private sector pensions.” [...]

“Overall, the pension system does not deliver “social insurance” in the traditional sense. The GCR remains roughly a flat-rate system—about 90 percent of the pensioners receive the minimum. This makes the GCR similar to social assistance. By contrast, CGA pensions are relatively high—average public pensions are nearly 100 percent of average public wages, reflecting mostly benefits granted under the old system—and are provided only to a small share of the population. This makes the CGA more similar to a private defined benefit system rather than social insurance, although in an unsustainable way.”