Portugal has become an unexpected record breaker. In May 2019, the country’s Public Debt Agency auctioned benchmark 10-year government bonds at a yield of 1.06%, a historic low. Earlier in the year the National Statistics Institute announced that the budget deficit had fallen to 0.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018, the lowest level since the country returned to democracy 45 years ago.
In April, Eurostat noted that youth unemployment had fallen further in Portugal than in any other eurozone country over the previous 12 months, while over the past three years the overall jobless rate has fallen twice as fast as in the eurozone as a whole, dropping by almost half from 12.1% to about 6.8%. The Portuguese economy grew faster than the eurozone average in both 2017 and 2018, the first time in two decades that this has happened in two consecutive years.
