Portugal to receive additional sum from EU’s resilience plan

  • ECO News
  • 23 February 2022

Part of the PRR support is calculated based on the accumulated loss of GDP in 2020 and 2021.

The government expects to receive an additional €1.5 or 1.6 billion from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP), resulting from the new calculation of subsidies to each Member State, ECO knows.

The distribution of European funds to help economies recover from the pandemic was based on projections and not on concrete data. The final amount will only be known in June, but the Portuguese government is working on the assumption that it will receive €1.5 or €1.6 billion more in non-repayable funds than initially planned.

Under the RRP, Portugal had planned to receive €13.944 billion in subsidies, plus another €2.7 billion in loans, which will subsequently have to be repaid. Furthermore, the government has already pre-reserved in Brussels the possibility of activating an additional sum of €2.3 billion in loans to companies that can only be used in innovation projects or for capitalisation.

Part of the RRP support (30%) is calculated based on the accumulated loss of GDP in 2020 and 2021 and, therefore, as the macroeconomic data becomes known, the amounts will be adjusted. Thus, in late January, Observador revealed that Portugal would receive an additional bonus of €1 billion in non-repayable funds, a figure later officially confirmed by the Ministry of Finance to Jornal de Negócios. But according to calculations made by economist Zsolt Darvas, a researcher at European think tank Bruegel, the added sum for Portugal would be €1.6 billion.