Economic diplomacy: a critical analysis

• Autor(a) principal: Sousa, Jaime Pereira de
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/18985
• topic: Economic diplomacy; Internationalization; Spanish market; Foreign policy; Diplomacia económica; Internacionalização; Mercado espanhol; Política externa; Economia portuguesa; Relações económicas; Exportação; Internacionalização da economia; Trabalho de projeto; Portugal; Espanha

Economic Diplomacy is the key for countries’ foreign relations nowadays. Every day we see states using less classic diplomacy and defining more strategies to help increasing their exports, internationalize their companies and attract foreign investment. On a country like Portugal, small in size and population, Economic Diplomacy assumes even a bigger importance and without developing strong ideals and lines of action it will be completely swallowed by bigger countries both inside and outside the European Union. The aim of this thesis is to study the development of Economic Diplomacy in Portugal and understand how it evolved over time. Also throughout 7 interviews I studied the action of all the agents (Diplomatic, political and entrepreneurial) that compose the Portuguese Economic Diplomacy and how each of them are behaving to adapt to new circumstances. Taking into account that Spain is our biggest commercial partner, a big part of this thesis is dedicated just to investigate how the numbers of exports to this market are growing. Moreover, I try to figure out what is being made by both sides (Companies and diplomats) to help our economy being more international and having every day more companies with the financial capacity and the knowledge to move to the Spanish market. After all, the evidence presented in this thesis seems to indicate that Portuguese economy is clearly better on what concerns foreign relations than it was ten years ago, but still there is a margin of improvement…