A Bit More Detail

The MSC Opera cruise ship was among the first to arrive in Lisbon on Sept. 12. Other vessels, some the size of buildings, soon pulled into the River Tagus, lazily making their way to the heart of the Portuguese capital.

In all, a record seven vessels carrying 15,000 people arrived in the city that day, the Port of Lisbon estimates. As the ships docked alongside the river, tuk-tuk-style taxis lined up in a scene reminiscent of a town in Thailand -- rather than one of Europe’s oldest cities.

“It’s going to be a day to remember,” said Jose Amaral, a 33-year-old tuk-tuk driver who charges about 50 euros ($63) for a one-hour ride. “Forget the tram 28, this is the new way to see Lisbon,” he said, referring to the famous yellow tram that takes tourists to some of Lisbon’s historic hill-top sites.

The more than 1 million euros the tourists spent in less than 24 hours on that day helped Portugal’s economy, and the government heralded the flood of tourists as a sign that Lisbon is the place to be. For some residents, however, such flows risk ousting local inhabitants and traditional stores from the city’s ancient quarters as hostels and shops selling cheap trinkets and imitation handicrafts encroach -- threatening the very identity of a city that traces its history back to more than 2,000 years.

[. . .]

“While the new hotels have helped revamp some of the city’s decrepit buildings, an increasing number of residents in the Baixa are moving out because of the noise from the restaurants and the garbage,” said Antonio Rosado, head of the Association of Residents of the Baixa Pombalina area. “Some residents are unhappy because of the problems caused by the excess of businesses catering to tourists.”

Many of these tourists look to spend as little as possible, said Maria Goncalves, a shop clerk in Lisbon.

“What happens when everything around you turns into shops selling cheap souvenirs?” asked the 62-year-old who has worked at the Londres Salao fine fabrics shop in downtown Lisbon for more than four decades. “Tourists who come to Lisbon will no longer be able to see the best that we have to offer.”

In recent years, investors from Angola, former colony of Portugal, have bought significant chunks of Portuguese companies. Spanish officials are urging their counterparts in South and Latin America to come invest — never mind the conquest. And an exodus of bright young Portuguese is seeking opportunity abroad — often in erstwhile Portuguese colonies like Brazil, Angola and even East Timor.

It’s a significant reversal from decades past, when former colonies went begging their former masters for investment, aid and trade preferences, while stomaching the brain drain of their best-educated graduates. Now the roles have reversed, at least in some quarters. Some former colonies have become emerging markets, logging fast rates of growth, while the erstwhile imperialists are scrambling to stay afloat in the global recession.

Nowhere has the reversal been as dramatic as in Portugal and Angola. The former colonizer expects its economy will shrink 1.8 percent this year, while Angola, fat on diamonds and oil and Chinese love, grew nearly 12 percent annually from 2002 to 2011.

To be sure, the phenomenon is neither widespread nor particularly thoroughgoing. The Democratic Republic of Congo remains mired in terrible conflict, while its former overlord, Belgium, enjoys relative peace and absolute wealth. And for all the Indians snapping up real estate in the United Kingdom, hundreds of millions of Indians still struggle well below the poverty line. Angola’s riches, meanwhile, are concentrated among a handful of oligarchs, including the daughter of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who is worth some $3 billion. (She’s got a half-billion-dollar chunk of a Portuguese media company.) Moreover, the country’s relationship with Portugal got testy just last month, with dos Santos complaining that Europeans were casting aspersions on the ethics of Angolan investors.

But nowhere are northern countries’ woes on better display than in the reversal of migration patterns. Migrants tend to vote with their feet. Since widespread decolonization in the mid-1950s, they’ve tended to stream from global south to global north, often to the imperial motherland. After India’s independence from Britain, for instance, Indians tended to immigrate to “Commonwealth” countries, for instance, while Haitians often went to Francophone ones like France, French-speaking Canada or Belgium, and Angolans headed for Portugal.

The flow appears to be reversing — at least in Portugal and perhaps in other places. Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, young Portuguese have been streaming not only to wealthier European countries but also to former Portuguese colonies like East Timor, Brazil and Angola.

Below I will try to show that instead of a “century decline,” what characterizes Argentina’s economic evolution as compared to other countries is that it suffered a deep economic collapse from the mid 1970s to the end of the 1980s (in what follows, data is from the Maddison Project. http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/data.htm).

This structural break in the evolution of the GDP per capita (GDPpc) in Argentina can indeed be attributed to internal conditions in that country. But other than that, there is not much difference in the evolution of Argentina, when compared to, for instance, Australia, or Uruguay, two countries mentioned by The Economist as either not having suffered the “hundred year decline” and/or to have followed better economic and institutional policies than Argentina. It is true that other countries such as Korea or Spain, which had far lower GDPpc than Argentina during great part of the 20th Century overtook Argentina by a large margin since the 1970s. But it is also true that if Argentina had avoided the sharp drop in the 1970s and maintained the share of the US GDPpc that prevailed before that structural break, the country would have had now an income per capita above all countries in LAC and many European countries such as Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. And if it had maintained the lineal trend growth from the 1960s to the mid 1970s it would be now at about the level of New Zealand or Spain, according to the data of the Maddison Project. In other words, if Argentina had avoided the real tragedy that started in the mid 1970s, the country would be now a developed country.

The decline started with the fracture of the society after the death of Perón in 1974, but it was the subsequent military coup of March 1976, which aiming at stamping out the Peronist Party and its followers (a “final solution” for Argentina, if you will), killed and forced into exile a significant number of Argentines (which among other things hollowed the previously relatively well-built basis of scientists mainly in public universities), started to dismantle the manufacturing base that was supposed to give the Peronist Party its loyal labor base, generated the debt explosion that led to the 1980s debt crisis, and spent a large amount of fiscal resources into different military adventures (including the misguided invasion of the Malvinas, which generated further loses of lives as well). The Radical Party, with President Alfonsín, won the elections in 1983 and did a very good job at restoring the democratic institutions (including the unprecedented trials and imprisonment of the military leaders responsible for the tragedy of the 1970s. But the Administration was hobbled by the very weakened and highly indebted economy left by the previous dictatorial government, had to contend with a restive military (which attempted several coup d’etats in the 1980s and 1990s, until the putschists were finally defeated during the Menem Administration), was under the pressure of a labor force that was expecting improvements in its living conditions after a decade of wage compression under the military, and suffered the collapse of commodity prices in mid-1980s.

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling is skeptical that plans to archive vast quantities of archived data accumulated over decades, even centuries, are going to be viable.


• The Burgh Diaspora notes that for southern Europeans, Latin America is once again emerging as a destination--this time, the migration is of professionals seeking opportunities they can't find at home.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird links to a proposal by biologists that life initially evolved in highly saline environments.


• Democracy is still fragile in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Eastern Approaches notes.


• Odd placenames in Minnesota are analyzed at Far Outliers.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell notes the translation problems surrounding the Nazi term volkisch, liking one recent translator's suggestion that "racist" works best.


• Razib Khan at GNXP introduces readers to the historical background behind the recent ethnic conflict in Burma.


• Itching for Eestimaa's Guistino takes a look at same-sex marriage in Estonia.


• Savage Minds reviews Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands, which took a look at offshore banking centres like Cyprus.


• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer describes the background behind Elvis' 1957 performances in Toronto.


• The negative effects of mass migration to Russia from Central Asia on sending countries, especially the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are introduced at Window on Eurasia.

• The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell notes how Brazil is using the Afro-Brazilian majority legacy of the transatlantic slave trade to justify the construction of new transatlantic links with Africa.


• Crooked Timber comments upon the Irish anti-abortion laws that just cost a woman her life and the homophobia of the Reagan administration that made HIV/AIDS a laughing matter.


• Daniel Drezner wonders if the ongoing expanding Petraeus scandal will end up diminishing the American public's regard for the military.


• Eastern Approaches notes that no one in the Balkans seems to be commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the First Balkan War.


• Far Outlier's Joel quotes from Matthew Restall's Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest to describe how Christopher Columbus was really riding on the coat-tails of Portugal's successful long-range maritime exploration.


• Geocurrents observes efforts by some Arab Christians in the Levant to revive Aramaic.


• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Laurent Dubois' Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, highlighting the extent to which Haiti's catastrophes are the products of foreign meddling.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis maps Detroit. The extent to which the borders of the City of Detroit overlap with African-American majority populations, and to which the sprawl of Metro Detroit is constructed so as to detach the suburbs from any responsibility for the city at their region's center, is noteworthy.


• The Planetary Science Blog's Emily Lakdawalla reports on Carl Sagan's feminism.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer summarizes what's going on with Uruguay's decriminalization of marijuana for personal use.

• 80 Beats notes the introduction of commercial crawfish fishing on mountainous Lake Tahoe, instituted with the intent of controlling an invasive species.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait celebrates the first image taken by NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope, of famous black hole Cygnus X-1.


• Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros is very gloomy about Portugal's future.


• The Global Sociology Blog celebrates Fernando Henrique Cardoso, sociologist and Brazilian president.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen makes a confusing post, noting that some of the best-performing capitalist economies in the 1950s were Caribbean and/or colonial but going on from there to make unsupportable generalizations about Communist economies (rapid catch-up growth in the Communist bloc at the time, too).


• Slap Upside the Head notes that the "gay panic defense" of the Australian state of Queensland is being challenged by a petition campaign.


• Two posts from Supernova Condensate, one regarding an ancient fossil mushroom, the other discussing the SF trope of habitable moons.


• Towleroad notes that the European Union now requires aspirant member states to respect gay rights.

Tucked beneath towering cliffs on Madeira's storm-battered west Atlantic coast, the €50 million Marina do Lugar de Baixo aimed to provide the perfect welcome for super-luxury yachts.

Unfortunately, thanks to the huge waves that have fractured the harbour wall three times since it was built in 2005, not even the more adventurous yachtsmen have often been tempted, never mind passing billionaires in floating palaces.

Today it lies abandoned, a chain blocking the road where an Oleg Deripaska or Roman Abramovic might have strode ashore, the white clubhouse empty as the Marie Celeste.

Just as spectacular as the ocean breakers off Lugar de Baixo, however, are the waves of European Union cash that have been splashed around Madeira, a Portuguese-owned island better known for sweet wine and winter sun.

While the marina was financed mainly by the semi-independent Madeiran local government, €3.5 million came from Brussels, which, like the other backers, did not heed warnings that a stretch of coast popular with hard-core surfers might be less ideal for yachters.

[. . .] Madeira is now swimming in debt as deep as the Atlantic waters around it, thanks to a government-backed building spree fuelled in part, critics say, by over-generous Brussels grants. Today, despite a population of just 250,000, the local administration owes some €6 billion, nearly double the per capita public debt of mainland Portugal.

The financial crisis, which only came to light last autumn, is hugely embarrassing for Lisbon's leaders, who have already had to negotiate an €78 billion bail-out themselves from Brussels and the IMF. The island is now seen as Portugal's own little answer to Greece, widely considered the most feckless of the southern European debtor club.

"Madeira is like Greece in the Atlantic," said Gil Cana, a councillor in Madeira's opposition New Democracy Party, which blames years of unhealthily cosy relations between island politicians, developers and Brussels grant-makers.

"The European Union has given money too easily, and the government has borrowed far too much from banks. We are a tiny island, you can hardly see us on any map. To have a debt with so many zeros is crazy."

[. . .]

He points the finger at supporters of the island's president, Alberto João Jardim, 69, who has ruled here ever since 1978, making him one of Europe's longest-serving elected leaders.

A firebrand throwback to the days of Portugal's Salazar dictatorship, for which he once wrote propaganda, his popularity has been cemented - quite literally - by the billions he has spent developing the island, which, prior to the end of Portugal's dictatorship in 1974, was a poverty-stricken backwater.

Today, a 120-mile road and tunnel network links Madeira's previously isolated mountain communities, cutting journeys around its steep volcanic contours from four hours to just one.

But much of the money came from the €2bn in EU grants handed out over the last 25 years, and when that started to dry up a decade ago, Mr Jardim began borrowing on the open market instead, via publicly-backed development firms.

Thus did construction continue, to the point where today, even small villages boast lavish civic centres, swimming pools, and football pitches.

As the government-owned newspaper, the Jornal, dutifully reports, the president cuts the ribbons at up to 450 opening ceremonies a year, using them for political rallies where he denounces his enemies in lengthy speeches. Spain's El Mundo newspaper calls him "El Maestro del Insulto" - the master of insults.