Rui Nuno Baleiras at Conference on Regional Development

Rui Nuno Baleiras, the Executive Member of the fiscal council’s Senior Board, scholar and former Secretary of State for Regional Development, participated in a conference on Regional Development held on 17^th February 2016 at Nova School of Business and Economics, in Lisbon. The event was part of a conference cycle organised by Nova Economics Club, a student venture to stimulate the interest of graduate and final-year undergraduate students on knowledge transfer between the academia and real-world institutions. Other speakers were also academics with public policy experience: Francisco Nunes Correia (water resource expert and civil engineering professor, former Minister for Environment, Spatial Planning and Regional Development), Miguel Poiares Maduro (constitutional law professor and ex-Minister for Regional Development) and Rui Baptista (innovation and entrepreneurship researcher, former advisor to the Minister for Economy). Susana Peralta, public economics professor, served as the chair person.

In his address, Rui Nuno Baleiras called attention to the point that all territories, no matter how small and peripheral they are, give a positive contribution to national growth. Quoted OECD research supported his claim. Public policies should concentrate their impetus on the unleashing of brakes to competitiveness, growth and jobs in all territories, especially in the least prosperous. Modern endogenous growth and development theory provides useful guidelines to policy-making. The member of the Portuguese Public Finance Council (CFP) reminded that territories are the places where policies and people meet to note right afterwards that a number of institutional failures render such meetings rather unfortunate. These failures are not a Portugal’s exclusive attribute although their consequences are particularly serious in this country. Public governance is structured vertically, according to sectors and communication across them is extremely weak. This institutional design is not appropriate to approach horizontal, across-the-board, multidisciplinary economic and social challenges, as is certainly the case of economic development. Prof. Baleiras left clues on how to reform the general government, including the structure of the central government Cabinet, to address better horizontal problems, such as regional development. This topic is dealt with extensively in a recent article by Rui N. Baleiras published as CFP’s Occasional Paper No. 3/2014.

Date of last update: 17/02/2016