hi all,

I've been reading an article and I found a line hard to understand.


“My estimate is that we are considerably better off than we would have been had the program not been implemented,”

Does it mean "if the program had not been implemented, we would be considerably better off now"? or something else?

I added contexts below to do a little help... It's from New York Times.

Thanks in advance!


In Portugal, unemployment, while starting to decline, is still above 15 percent, higher than the euro zone average. Tens of thousands of workers have moved to Britain or Germany, as well as more distant but Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil and Angola, in search of better futures. And despite formally leaving its bailout program, Portugal will still need decades to pay down the total of €738 billion ($1 trillion) in public and private debt the country has amassed.

****“My estimate is that we are considerably better off than we would have been had the program not been implemented,” *****
said Luís Cabral, a Portuguese economist and professor at New York University. “The death spiral that was predicted for the Portuguese economy failed to materialize.” And by allowing Portugal to regain its borrowing ability, he argued, “austerity has made a positive contribution to growth.”

Having emerged last year from recession, Portugal is now expected to grow more than 1 percent both this year and next. That is about in line with the 1.2 percent growth that the European Commission forecast for the euro zone as a whole this year and 1.7 percent for 2015.