They have benefited from a strong but not overvalued currency, from the absence of competitive devaluations, from a market larger than the national one and easily accessible. Countries such as ours that came from repeated bouts of inflation and currency crises have obtained stable prices and low interest rates, two basic prerequisites of economic development. We have taken little advantage of it.
Political inertia, disregard of the rules and mistaken economic decisions have favoured the emergence of internal imbalances, long obscured by the euro and unheeded by the markets, which today put the entire European edifice at risk.