[LINK] "Portuguese With No Pay From Oil Bust in Africa Go Home to No Job"

[rfmcdonald]

I've noted in the past that the Portuguese economy, at best stagnant, depended heavily on the income earned by Portuguese migrants in oil-rich Angola. Now that the Angolan economic boom has ended, Henrique Almeida and Joao Lima write for Bloomberg about the Portuguese now left with no options.

If there’s one thing Paulo Goncalves has learned about markets and economics over the past couple of years, it’s that he can run, but he can’t hide.

The 51-year-old left Portugal for oil-rich Angola in 2010 to escape rising unemployment a year before Portugal sought an international bailout and the economy plunged into recession. After doing well working in construction, the oil price started declining and he stopped getting paid. Now he’s back home and after six months of looking found a job that pays the same as what he earned 20 years ago and a fifth of his money in Angola.

“I had a good salary in Angola, but the money stopped coming in,” said Goncalves, who now lives in Quinta do Conde, a town in the southern suburbs of Lisbon. “Now I can’t find any decent jobs in Portugal.”

The countries hardest hit by Europe’s debt crisis saw waves of emigration in recent years, as Irish, Spanish and Greeks sought respite from record rates of unemployment. The Portuguese headed to former colonies such as Angola, Africa’s second-largest oil producer. Caught between a job without pay or a job not paying enough, Goncalves now epitomizes the dilemma facing thousands of his compatriots.

The government in Lisbon now fears the difficulties of an estimated 115,000 Portuguese nationals in Angola may prompt many to return home to a job market that has yet to recover.