Produtividade e tretas académicas

Ontem escrevi sobre "Como se aumenta a produtividade por hora de trabalho?"

Depois, durante o dia perguntaram-me se tinha algum conselho geral sobre como se aumenta a produtividade. 

Quem pretende aumentar a produtividade num país deve pensar em aumentar a produtividade nas empresas concretas que povoam cada sector de actividade. E quando se olha para um sector de actividade encontra-se uma grande variabilidade de produtividades, uma grande variabilidade de rentabilidades.

Recordo a frase:

Existe mais variabilidade dentro de um sector de actividade do que entre sectores de actividade.

Assim, para cada sector de actividade, sugiro estudar as diferenças entre empresas concretas no topo da produtividade e comparar com as empresas na média do sector.

Entretanto, ao final da tarde de ontem encontrei o suplemento do Jornal Económico, "Relançar a Economia", publicado a 26.06.2020. Aí, no artigo "A reindustrialização nas mãos da economia portuguesa" sublinhei com desânimo alguns trechos proferidos por João Duque:

"João Duque defende que Portugal tem de “procurar setores de elevado valor acrescentado e com valor de marca. E, para isso, é fundamental o associativismo de setor e o estímulo a esse associativismo. Ganhar escala para sermos visíveis, como tão bem fizeram os industriais do calçado, por exemplo." [Moi ici: OMG! Aposto que João Duque nunca estudou o sector do calçado. Recordo a evolução do tamanho das empresas no sector em "Não vai ser nenhum 'lay-off' que as vai preparar para essa transição". Recomendaria a João Duque a leitura da série "Quantas empresas"]

Um outro trecho escandaloso, porque revela a falta de noção, a falta de estudo, a falta de percepção do que é a realidade concreta e não treta de macroeconomia:

"“Para começar, acho que podemos ir à lista de importações e começar a fazer o que importamos. Se conseguimos passar a fazer ventiladores, porque não outras coisas?”"

 Leram isto? Agora, deixem mergulhar bem fundo na vossa consciência o significado de um comentador económico e professor universitário proferir esta afirmação.

Portugal importa calçado? Sim

Portugal exporta calçado? Sim

Faz sentido Portugal produzir internamente o calçado que importa? Nope! quem pagaria os salários desses operários? 

Recordo:

"preço médio de um par de sapatos exportado de Portugal: 26.08 USD

preço médio de um par de sapatos importado para Portugal: 10.76 USD"

Recordo:

"Acaso a indústria portuguesa de mobiliário pode competir, num mercado aberto, com os preços do mobiliário asiático?

 E, no entanto:

"A taxa de cobertura das exportações pelas importações do período em referência é de 235%.""

 Nós produzimos para exportação a preços mais altos e importamos o barato para consumo interno. O futuro da economia portuguesa não é a reduzir importações, mas a exportar mais ainda. Sublinho:

"The Dutch (56%) are more then twice reliant on exports than Greece (21%), Turkey (20%), Portugal (26%) and Italy (24%)"

Assim se percebe a quantidade de treta académica do comentariado que enche o espaço no panorama mediático nacional. 

Como se aumenta a produtividade por hora de trabalho?

"Portugal é o sétimo país da União Europeia com menor produtividade por hora de trabalho, divulgou este sábado a Pordata, num retrato ao tecido empresarial do país, a propósito do Dia das Micro, Pequenas e Médias Empresas.

...

“Em termos de produtividade por hora de trabalho, face à média da UE27 (=100), Portugal é um dos países com menor produtividade (65% da média da UE27)”, revelou a base de dados estatísticos da Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, que analisou dados de 2018."

Uma batalha antiga neste blogue.

Como se aumenta a produtividade por hora de trabalho?

Falo de aumento a sério, não de migalhas. Como se aumenta a produtividade por hora de trabalho?

Aumentando os preços do que se vende.

Não façam, como eu, o papel de burros. Há um truque para subir preços sem perder clientes.

Recordar este postal de 2018 sobre o aumento de salários e o Evangelho do Valor!

Trechos retirados de "Portugal é o 7.º país da UE com menor produtividade por hora de trabalho"

 

Um provinciano muito à frente

No FT, edição americana, de ontem podia ler-se "Coronavirus rips a hole in newspapers’ business models":

"Our thesis is you have to invest in a product to have a chance at the digital media business. [Netflix chief executive] Reed Hastings believes that. What is striking to me is how few people [in news] have tried this. A lot of people are just trying to keep things from falling away.” The New York Times on Tuesday cut 68 jobs, largely in advertising, sparing the newsroom.

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‘The industry was so flush’

Industry executives admit that the news business responded disastrously to the advent of the internet. Premium content was given away for free, while the publisher’s role between reader and advertiser was left wide open for others to intermediate, or replace.

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“We were extraordinarily naive, because the industry was so flush,” says Terry Egger, a veteran of the news business who recently retired as publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “In the mid-1990s, there was so much profit . . . the internet was a novelty not taken seriously.

...

The question is how far the subscriber model will stretch and whether it could ever replace the income from advertising. “Subscription revenue is more sustainable, it is recurrent, it has a lot of advantages,” says Kristin Skogen Lund, chief executive of Schibsted, the biggest publisher in Scandinavia, the region with the world’s highest density of news subscriptions. “The problem . . . is that the revenue base is simply not large enough. You would need to charge so much for a subscription to sustain the entire cost of running a media site.”

Recordar "O futuro do jornalismo" (Dezembro de 2017) e "Uma novela sobre Mongo (parte XV)" (Janeiro de 2017)

O canário na mina

O Jornal de Negócios de ontem, 25 de Junho de 2020, o podcast de ontem de Camilo Lourenço no Facebook e este texto de ontem no ECO, "UTAO arrasa proposta de Leão que remove “pilares” da LEO. É um “retrocesso”" traçam um retrato do buraco onde estamos em queda livre.

Alguns "recortes" dos Jornal de Negócios de ontem:

Repare naqueles 39 mil milhões de euros...

Repare naqueles 22%... quase um quarto dos créditos totais

Depois recorde os números do desemprego... recorde o estado actual e futuro do turismo e do peso que tinha no PIB e no emprego.

Depois, pense no significado disto:

Propósito deste postal para o mundo empresarial: dar um conselho sem ter sido pedido.

Comece a fazer testes de stress à sua empresa ASAP. 

Quando os bancos adiam os seus testes de stress é o canário na mina para que as empresas os comecem a fazer e a preparar o barco para uma tempestade.

‘Come on, this is serious’

"There is no general theory of how best to make decisions. Much of the academic literature on decision-making under uncertainty tries to frame the challenge as a puzzle. All decisions, it is assumed, can be expressed as mathematical problems. And potentially capable of being solved by computers. Your smartphone will tell you what restaurants are nearby, how to get there, and perhaps what you ate last night; but not where and what you want to eat now. The probably apocryphal but nevertheless illuminating story about a decision theorist contemplating whether or not to accept a job offer from a rival university illustrates this well: upon being urged by his colleague to apply tenets of rational decision-making under uncertainty and maximise his expected utility, as his academic papers suggested, he responded with exasperation, ‘Come on, this is serious.’

Humans have evolved to cope with problems which are not amenable to probabilistic reasoning 

...

Our brains are not built like computers but as adaptive mechanisms for making connections and recognising patterns. Good decisions often result from leaps of the imagination. Creativity was the quality exhibited by that unknown Sumerian who invented the wheel, by Einstein, and by Steve Jobs. And, as Knight and Keynes emphasised, creativity is inseparable from uncertainty. By its nature, creativity cannot be formalised, only described after the event, with or without the help of equations."

Trechos retirados de “Radical Uncertainty” de John Kay e Mervyn King

I see zombies everywhere!

Em Outubro passado escrevi aqui no blogue em, "Produtividade e socialismo (parte III)", sobre as empresas zombies em Portugal, na altura supostamente seriam mais de 20%.

Já em Dezembro de 2018 tinha escrito aqui no blogue sobre o grito: "Deixem as empresas morrer!"

Já em Maio deste ano voltei ao tema com "E a zombificação?"

Agora no FT pode-se ler "Reasons to fear the march of the zombie companies":

"Money has never been cheaper. Governments and central banks have acted quickly to make it both plentiful and accessible to support companies through the pandemic downturn. The cure, however, has a sting in its tail. As policymakers begin to unwind job retention schemes and other support measures the concern is that economic recovery will be held back by a proliferation of debt-laden companies shuffling across a corporate twilight zone: a whole generation of zombies.

...

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, a decade of low interest rates helped to fuel a rise in the number of “living dead”: companies unable to cover their debt-servicing costs from profits in the long term. 

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The pandemic has created new ones. There are also fears of a proliferation of unviable “zombie jobs”, kept on life support through furlough schemes. People working in sectors struggling under strict social-distancing rules, such as hospitality and retail, are especially vulnerable.

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Allowing zombie companies to limp along, unable to invest or repay their debts, comes at a cost to the wider economy. Research has shown these companies are a drag on productivity growth." 

BTW, desta vez não estou de acordo com Bruno Maçães e vamos deixar a realidade decidir quem tem razão. 

Os especialistas versus os generalistas

Este postal de Seth Godin, "What’s at the front of the line?" é muito sugestivo:

"A study of behavior at breakfast buffets showed that the first item in the buffet was taken by 75% of the diners (even when the order of the items was reversed) and that two-thirds of all the food taken came from the first three items, regardless of how long the buffet is.

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This means that optimizing marketers usually put the things they most want to sell first.

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And that smart consumers benefit from adopting patience as they consider what’s on offer.

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Of course, this game theory applies to a lot more than food."

Dá que pensar... faz-me lembrar os especialistas versus os generalistas do one-stop-shop.

 

"what happens to organizations that get stuck"

“All too often, this is precisely what happens to organizations that get stuck. They return to the same practices and methods well past their point of effectiveness. Sometimes we’ve had our line in the water in the same place for so long we don’t even notice we haven’t gotten any bites in a really long time. To see problems and their solutions in a different light—to become more radical in our approach—we may have to fish in a totally different body of water, with different crew members and wholly new tools. [Moi ici: Como não recordar Zapatero e o paradoxo dos peritos]

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“We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.”[Moi ici: Como não recordar "Beware of the invisible water in the tank"]

—John Culkin”

Mais um trecho retirado de "Remarkable Retail", desta feita do capítulo 19 "Essential #9: Radical".

"Organizations don’t just prepare for the future. They make it."

Outro trecho retirado da HBR de Julho-Agosto de 2020, "Learning from the future".

"Of course, strategic foresight also enables us to identify opportunities and amplifies our ability to seize them. Organizations don’t just prepare for the future. They make it. Moments of uncertainty hold great entrepreneurial potential. As Wack once wrote in these pages, “It is precisely in these contexts—not in stable times—that the real opportunities lie to gain competitive advantage through strategy.” It takes strength to stand up against the tyranny of the present and invest in imagination. Strategic foresight makes both possible—and offers leaders a chance for legacy. After all, they will be judged not only by what they do today but by how well they chart a course toward tomorrow."

Uma mensagem clássica deste blogue. 

Olha nós todos bem!

Olha todos bem!

E é só o começo!!!

O pagamento do subsídio de férias ainda não fez o seu estrago:

Não me convence

No semanário Expresso de Sábado passado, num artigo designado "Cuidado com a poupança", li:

"Bem sei que é inevitável a taxa de poupança aumentar quando a incerteza sobre o futuro se agrava. Costuma acontecer sempre. É natural e é humano. É isso que explica que o consumo caia mais do que o rendimento. As pessoas consomem menos porque têm menos dinheiro, em primeiro lugar, mas também por precaução, por não saberem o que aí vem.

...

Poupar é abdicar de consumo presente em troca de consumo futuro: faz todo o sentido se acharmos que aquilo que nos espera é pior do que o que hoje vivemos. Mas o efeito agregado de todas essas decisões individuais não é nada simpático para a economia.

...

Quando a família adia a compra de um carro, até pode ficar com mais dinheiro no banco, mas economia encolhe — e, lá está, a poupança aumenta.

...

mais poupança é menos consumo e isso, já se sabe, só pode dar em menos PIB. Porque a economia são muitas famílias. É a família Silva que decidiu não comprar o carro. Mas é também a família Nunes, em que o pai, que trabalha num stand automóvel, ficou desempregado.

...

Portugal é um país que tem poupado pouco desde que aderiu ao euro? Sem dúvida. É por isso que andámos anos a acumular défices externos. Reconhecer isto não é o mesmo que dizer que poupar é sempre bom. Há alturas em que, mesmo sendo compreensível, não é a opção mais vantajosa da economia. Na hora de poupar, é melhor ter cuidado. Enquanto poupa, pode haver alguém que também está a cortar-lhe o dinheiro que tem na carteira."

Há qualquer coisa neste racional que não me convence. 

Como é que se transforma dívida em capital? 

Como é que se cria um novo normal mais sustentável do que o anterior? Não é a replicar as interacções económicas do passado que nos trouxeram até aqui. Talvez o senhor Nunes tenha mesmo de ir para o desemprego no curto prazo para termos uma economia mais sustentável. 

O futuro pode ser uma causa a actuar no presente

Um artigo à boa moda antiga na revista HBR de Julho-Agosto de 2020, "Learning from the future".

"If companies want to make effective strategy in the face of uncertainty, they need to set up a process of constant exploration—one that allows top managers to build permanent but flexible bridges between their actions in the present and their thinking about the future. What’s necessary, in short, is not just imagination but the institutionalization of imagination. That is the essence of strategic foresight.

...

uncertainty precludes prediction but demands anticipation—and that imaginatively and rigorously exploring plausible futures can facilitate decision-making.

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Humans tend to conceive of time as linear and unidirectional, as moving from past to present to future, with each time frame discrete. We remember yesterday; we experience today; we anticipate tomorrow. But the best scenario planning embraces a decidedly nonlinear conception of time. That’s what Long View and Evergreen did: They took stock of trends in the present, jumped many years into the future, described plausible worlds created by those drivers, worked backward to develop stories about how those worlds had come to pass, and then worked forward again to develop robust strategies. In this model, time circles around on itself, in a constantly evolving feedback cycle between present and future. In a word, it is a loop.

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Once participants began to view time as a loop, they understood thinking about the future as an essential component of taking action in the present. [Moi ici: Ao ler isto, como não recordar Ortega Y Gasset e como ele nos mostra que o futuro pode ser uma causa a actuar no presente] The scenarios gave them a structure that strengthened their ability to be strategic, despite tremendous uncertainty." 

"Customer focus is a choice—and a critically important one"

Mais um trecho retirado de "Remarkable Retail", desta feita do capítulo 16 "Essential #5: Personal". Só que desta vez parece retirado deste blogue:

"A while later, Bessemer Trust, a leading private wealth management firm, ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “We may not be right for you.” The copy then explained the bank’s narrow customer focus and highly specialized services.

In the quest for maximizing revenue, many companies are afraid to make a similar leap. But as you design your journey to remarkable, one of the first questions you must answer is: who are we building this strategy for? Customer focus is a choice—and a critically important one. You must push yourself to go beyond the “affluent suburban soccer moms” target customer definition to get real clarity and granularity around which people in particular, under which specific set of conditions, are at the center of your bull’s-eyes. Notice the plural there: you likely have more than one target. You must also be able to articulate how your value proposition meets those customers in a unique, highly relevant, and remarkable way. With that precise definition you can build your strategies for the best-fit customers and be at peace with letting the ones go that aren’t right for you.

Out of either inertia, lack of experience, or fear, retailers, organizations, bloggers, and all sorts of individual artists often chase the largest possible audience. They want the most followers, the most traffic to their website, the largest addressable market, and other goals that have way more to do with quantity instead of quality. In turn they dilute their pitch to become just okay instead of remarkable. If you have a great product, are serving a wonderful social cause, or have an incredible story to be told or an amazing song in your heart, it’s natural to want to reach more customers. If you are investing a lot of resources in pursuit of building a customer base or an audience, you should be mindful of the scale required to achieve viability. Sometimes size does matter.

The flip side of gaining clarity and granularity around who is at the center of your bull’s-eye is also being crystal clear about who your product or service isn’t for. The siren song of growth at all costs may distract you and pull you away from your center. Resist the temptation. Being remarkable is often inherently linked to being, as Scott Galloway reminds us, “special, not big.” As you expand from those special qualities that first commanded certain customers’ attention, enrolled them fully in your mission, and motivated them to spread the word, you risk becoming less remarkable (or even alienating) to what I call “obsessive core customers” because what it takes to reach a wider audience waters down what made you successful in the first place."

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You can register here.

One of the slides is about the big picture:

"Many customer purchases are motivated by what seems like two paradoxical forces: the desire to be distinctive and the desire to belong. At one level, we value our uniqueness and we hope that we won’t be seen as only a number in the system or blindly following the crowd. While we may want to hide or conform sometimes, most of us want to feel special a good deal of the time.

As much as we have a strong need for individuation, few of us want to be seen as outcasts or profoundly weird either. We want to feel connected to the people whose relationships we value, whose opinions influence us, and whose affirmation we crave. The sense of fitting in with the “right” group of people colors many of our actions and goes a long way to explaining the “people like us do things like this” phenomenon.

Accordingly, we are unlikely to do something that might cause us to risk our sense of belonging with those whose opinions we care about. We won’t do anything that will evoke a “what the heck were you thinking?” look or comment. Once we feel reasonably comfortable that our sense of belonging is secure—and even better, that we might receive affirmation—then our mindset shifts to more specific individual concerns that reinforce our uniqueness and serve to make us feel special.

In short, no customer wants to be average, and the way the digital revolution has manifested, no customer has to be."

Trechos retirados do capítulo 16 "Essential #5: Personal" de Remarkable Retail.

Como poderá funcionar um negócio baseado na hipótese de Mongo?

"One of the byproducts of the pandemic has been to accelerate a series of trends that were already in motion; this includes our consumption habits. Buying “less but better” has become a popular mantra in recent years due to concerns about sustainability and waste. And in the past couple of months this talk has escalated: in lockdown people are reflecting on what they actually want and need – plus, in many cases, they have less money to spend. [Moi ici: É um discurso que há anos é partilhado entre algumas marcas, como a Patagonia, e os seus clientes. Lembro-me de uma campanha em que clientes mostravam-se a usar peças com mais de 20 anos. Agora daí até ser mainstream... a minha mulher passa na Baixa do Porto ao final da tarde e diz-me que a única loja com fila à porta, todos os dias, é a Bershka. No entanto, não o nego é uma tendência em linha com a hipótese de Mongo]

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More considered buying is good and necessary – the fashion, design, cosmetics, technology and other industries produce too much stuff and churn through trends at alarming rates – but I do wonder about the ripples that a rethink will cause.

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Brands and factories make their money from manufacturing and selling lots of things. If shoppers are buying fewer products, adjustments will need to be made. Will there be a general hike in prices – and quality – to accommodate consumer preferences? Will brands need to increase product margins in order to make the same amount of money from selling fewer items? Is fast fashion as we know it slowing? This moment of reckoning comes with fewer products – but lots of questions." [Moi ici: A acreditar na tendência da hipótese de Mongo, no futuro teremos cada vez mais marcas, teremos cada vez mais tribos, teremos fábricas cada vez mais pequenas. Sim Pedro, concordo consigo, nem sei se as poderemos chamar de fábricas, talvez ateliês, talvez cooperativas. Façamos um exercício: sem custos afundados, começando com uma folha em branco, como poderá funcionar um negócio baseado na hipótese de Mongo?]

Seth Godin fez-me ver que o mundo económico do século XX foi criado pelos industrialistas que criaram um modelo que servia os seus interesses económicos legítimos. A produção em massa beneficiava-os, mas os consumidores também tinham acesso a produtos escassos a um preço acessível. 

Num mundo de escassez quem manda é quem produz.

Contudo, assim que a oferta passou a ser maior que a procura, momento que simbolicamente associo à entrada dos micro-Hondas no Portugal da primeira metade dos anos 70 do século passado, o poder começou a passar para os consumidores, e os industrialistas têm de se submeter, a menos que comandem uma marca associada a escassez, ou a uma tribo.

Trechos retirados de "Cap and trade"  

Beware of the invisible water in the tank

Seth Godin in a recent blog post, “The dominant culture”, wrote:

 “One of the great cartoons involves two goldfish in a tank talking to one another. One responds in surprise, “wait, there’s water?””

This remind me of a growing concern in my analysis of the business world. Too often we analyze information about certain cases, about certain solutions, about certain methodologies and approaches, without being aware of the assumptions on which they are based. Why? Because no one cared about the water in the tank. 

 

For example, for years and years I have heard comments and stories, I have read wonders about the Toyota Production System.

 

Is it spectacular? Yes!

 

However, it was only in 2017 that I read in an article something that nobody ever says, either because they are unaware or because it is the water in the tank ... - Toyota "freezes" production 8 weeks in advance.

 

How many companies can afford to do this? And how many companies cannot do it, but try in good faith to implement the Toyota Production System in their production?

 

Recently also, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article, “The Surprising Way Companies Can Shore Up Their Financial Strength”:

“The Drucker Institute’s statistical model serves as the basis for the Management Top 250, an annual ranking produced in partnership with The Wall Street Journal.

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In total, we examined 820 large, publicly traded companies last year through the lens of 34 indicators across five categories: customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility and financial strength.

To construct our ranking, corporations are compared in each of the five areas, as well as in their overall effectiveness, through standardized scores with a range of 0 to 100 and a mean of 50.

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Our model reflects shareholder returns, along with a variety of metrics that capture how effectively a firm has deployed its capital, among other things.

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For companies in the health-care sector, we found over the course of the seven-year period a significant statistical relationship between financial strength and one other category: employee engagement and development. To be precise, a five-point gain in the latter produced a 0.79-point increase in the former.

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That may not look like a big deal on its face. But it would have been enough to vault a company from the 50th percentile in financial strength to the 56th in last year’s rankings—up 38 spots on the list.

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Meanwhile, it is a whole other story for companies in the industrial sector, which includes the airlines. There, it is social responsibility that should command the most attention. A five-point rise in that category translated into a 0.49-point upturn in financial strength.

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For example, a health-care company wanting to lift its customer-satisfaction score can expect to reap an extra 0.49 points in that category for every five-point advance in employee engagement and development. But an industrial company hoping to achieve a similar bump in customer satisfaction should shoot for a five-point improvement in another area: innovation.”

While reading the article I thought about the water in the tank. Do these recommendations, do these relationships apply equally to all companies in the same economic sector?

I don't think so.

 

Some days ago, someone made the following comment to me:

 

“KPIs for production are simple: efficiency, low losses.”

 

When I heard that the picture of Bruce Jenner came to my mind.

Beware of the invisible water in the tank.

O ecossistema à volta de uma organização

"Implementing a human-centered strategy must begin by contemplating in some detail which groups are important to us, assessing their role in driving the outcomes we seek, and understanding what needs to happen to support our remarkable journey. With this knowledge we can identify and prioritize the actions we need to implement.

There are many ways to group the constituencies and stakeholders we must consider. Here’s my preferred way to organize them.

1. Consumers: Seems simple enough, but we must be sure to include current customers, lapsed customers, and prospects, i.e., all the important individuals we seek to acquire, grow, retain, and spread our story.

2. Tribes: I’m using this term, at least broadly, in the way that Seth Godin did in his 2008 book of the same name: “a tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” The interplay among members of our target consumers’ tribes is what helps us gain insight into their collective needs. Importantly, tribes are central to spreading our brand’s story.

3. Networks: The principal difference between a network and a tribe is that while many of the dynamics may be similar, there is less organization around a leader and a shared idea. Your book club is probably a tribe. Your group of Facebook friends or Instagram followers is a network.

4. Employees: It’s not a new idea to include an organization’s employees (or “associates” or “team members” as many retailers call them) explicitly in our strategy. In human-centered retail there are two emphasized factors. One is to include and connect them to the broader view. The other is to be sure to dial in more of the emotional considerations.

5. Investors: Without capital, few enterprises can achieve their goals, so we may find ourselves borrowing money and/or seeking equity funds.

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6. Collaborators: This used to be more straightforward. Every organization has different partners in their success: product vendors, marketing agencies, delivery companies, and so on. They are all included in this group.

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7. Our Community: Getting involved in city-wide or neighborhood activities has often been an arrow in the “quiver of local, independent retailers, but being mindful of both the critical inputs and our impact on the places we live is moving to the forefront.

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8. The Planet: Although one would hope that corporations and governing bodies alike would pay more attention to this, for the most part it isn’t happening."

Trechos retirados do capítulo 13 "Essential #2: Human-Centered" de Remarkable Retail.

"Vamos ficar todos mesmo bem"

"No Boletim Económico divulgado ontem, o Banco de Portugal reviu em baixa a sua estimativa de recessão para este ano, esperando agora uma contração económica de 9,5% este ano – que pode chegar aos 13,1% num cenário mais adverso. Em março, quando a pandemia tinha chegado a Portugal, os técnicos da instituição ainda liderada por Carlos Costa esperavam uma queda de 5,7% no PIB.

O BdP, que era a instituição mais otimista, torna-se agora na mais pessimista, aproximando-se de outras instituições que recentemente apresentaram as suas projeções e que fazem crer que quanto mais recente é a estimativa para a economia portuguesa, maior a probabilidade de ser mais negativa."

O PIB entre 2009 e 2013 terá caído um acumulado de cerca de 6%... o que será cair 11% num único ano?

Sinto que estamos algures durante a conversa deste anúncio:

Trecho retirado do Jornal de Negócios "Banco de Portugal põe em xeque pressupostos do retificativo"

Acerca do futuro

No Financial Times de dia 15 de Junho um artigo de Wolfgang Münchau sobre ... a impressão 3D 

"In the 1960s Roy Amara, a Stanford computer scientist, observed that “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”.

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Supply chain managers in industrial companies will be busy right now studying alternative sources that are more local. They may trade efficiency for robustness. They may be looking at automation. Back in February, they may not have seen the need to fix what did not seem broken. But now it is.

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A recent 3D printing industry survey found that companies are looking at the technology differently, with more of them now considering using it for end production rather than just prototypes.

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A German study in 2015 predicted that the economic impact of 3D printing would be to lower barriers to entry, making it easier for companies to serve different markets and cutting prices for consumers. It would constitute what economists call a positive supply shock.

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More localised production would also cut the cost of transport and contribute to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

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There are downsides. Export-led growth has been the business model of developing countries. More localised manufacturing would hurt them. Automation will improve the employment prospects of some but reduce those of others. A mechanical or chemical engineer can perhaps retrain and find niches in other high-tech areas.

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Like many technological inventions of the past, this one could also give rise to new forms of inequality. Economies with strong high-tech investment such as the US and China would do well. European countries would probably not be at the forefront — to put it mildly — but there may be niches for those with a strong technological focus,"

Recordar "O mundo que conhecemos nos últimos 20 anos vai mudar (parte II)"

 

Trechos retirados de "3d printing can be a real source for optimism"