Housing is perhaps the best example. Today we know that Portugal has accumulated a deficit of more than 300 thousand houses since 2014, the result of long-identified factors, such as insufficient construction, lack of labour, rising costs, scarcity of land ready to build, and too slow planning and licensing processes. We did not wake up one day with a housing crisis; we were building it slowly.

This is precisely why it is worth looking at the latest OECD report on tourism. Not because Portugal is currently experiencing a tourism crisis – on the contrary, the sector continues to be one of the great success stories of the Portuguese economy – but because the document helps to understand the problems that may arise if we continue to measure success essentially through growth. There is, in fact, a particularly relevant signal: the Tourism Strategy 2027, approved in 2017, achieved its economic objectives at the end of 2024, leading Portugal to start, in 2025, the preparation of a new vision for the following decade, until 2035. The question is no longer just how to grow. It has become how to grow better.

The OECD points precisely in this direction. The new vision for Portugal places among the priorities greater creation of economic value, productivity, territorial cohesion, quality of life of communities, climate resilience, qualification of workers, modernisation of companies and use of technology and data. This is perhaps the most important warning: a country can receive more tourists every year and still not derive all the possible economic value from this growth. It can increase overnight stays without sufficiently increasing productivity, create jobs without improving wages, concentrate investment in the same territories while others continue to lose population, and increase pressure on housing, transport, water and infrastructure without strengthening the capacity of these same infrastructures. Success also needs to be planned.

Housing should have taught us that. When supply does not keep up with growing demand for years, the adjustment ends up happening through prices. In tourism, risk can take other forms: saturation of certain destinations, lack of workers, pressure on residents, rising operating costs or loss of competitiveness. The OECD itself also warns of climate risks capable of changing the geography and seasonality of tourist demand and increasing costs and risks for companies and destinations.

None of this means putting a stop to tourism. It means precisely the opposite: protecting one of the most important sectors of the Portuguese economy through decisions taken while we still have time to make them. Portugal is now designing the tourism strategy until 2035 and has enough data, studies and experience to anticipate many of the challenges. Ten years from now, we should not be able to say that we did not know. The true value of a study like this will not be in explaining, in the future, where we went wrong, but in helping us to avoid mistakes today that tomorrow will be much more expensive to correct.