The real engine of the next decade is called productivity!

For many years, we have become accustomed to evaluating the performance of the Portuguese economy through some relatively simple indicators: GDP growth, job creation, exports, investment or the number of tourists. All are still important, but there is another indicator that will probably determine our standard of living much more over the next decade: productivity.

By Paulo Lopes, in Business · 27 Sep 2026, 07:01 · 0 Comments

Credits: envato elements; Author: YuriArcursPeopleimages;

The topic is not new. Portugal has been discussing productivity for decades and remains far from the most productive European economies. What has changed is the urgency. An ageing population, companies struggling to find certain skills, and a world economy increasingly dependent on technology make it progressively more difficult to grow simply by adding more workers, more working hours, or more installed capacity. The next leap will have to happen through the ability to produce more value with the resources we already have.

This is also why productivity should not be confused with working more. Some of the European countries with higher salaries do not necessarily work more hours than Portugal. They are able to generate more value per hour worked. They do so through more capitalised companies, more qualified workers, better management, more efficient processes, greater technological incorporation and products and services capable of competing in segments with higher added value. The wage gap that we so often discuss is, to a large extent, a consequence of this difference in the ability to create value.

Artificial intelligence makes this discussion even more relevant. AI, automation, digitalisation and robotics allow a company to produce more, reduce repetitive tasks, make better use of its resources and place workers in roles where they can generate greater value. For Portugal, where a large part of the business fabric is made up of small and medium-sized companies, the real technological revolution will not happen when a few large organisations start using artificial intelligence. It will happen when thousands of Portuguese companies incorporate these tools into their daily activity.

But technology, by itself, does not solve the problem either. An inefficient company does not automatically transform into a productive company because it buys new software. Management, qualifications, investment, the ability to grow and an economic environment that does not consume too much time and resources in bureaucracy are needed. Productivity results precisely from this combination of people, capital, knowledge, technology and institutions capable of allowing all this to work.

Portugal is attracting increasingly sophisticated investments, from data centres and digital infrastructures to advanced industry, energy, space technology and aeronautics. The opportunity lies in using these investments to also increase the capacity of Portuguese companies, creating suppliers, skills, innovation and knowledge that remain in the country.

For too long we asked how much Portugal could grow. In the next decade we will have to add another question: how much value can we create with each worker, each company, each euro invested and each new technology that arrives in the country?

Because the real challenge will not be to work harder. It will be to make our work worth more.