Government to present plan to introduce complementary pensions in Portugal

Portugal’s government is working on and will present a savings plan to strengthen supplementary pensions in Portugal, in addition to public pensions, at a time when the European Union (EU) is asking member countries to channel savings into productive investments.

“We will wait for the [European] Commission to finish its work and then we will present a savings plan that is being developed with regulators and also with market players,” announced Finance Minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento on Tuesday.

Speaking to Portuguese journalists in Brussels, at the end of the EU finance ministers’ meeting where the supplementary pension package proposed by the European Commission was discussed, the minister indicated that “savings in Portugal have increased significantly since the pandemic [because] historically they represented 7% or 8% of disposable income, and today they are around 12% or 13% of disposable income”.

“We need to channel these savings into more efficient solutions, with higher profitability and that allow for greater sustainability in the medium and long term,” he argued.

Source: Jornal Económico; Image: Government of Portugal