ابتلا به هسته اصلی اروپا: رشد اقتصادی پرتغال، 1910-1990

This paper analyses the causes of Portuguese catching-up to the European core, in the 20th century, within a growth accounting framework. It concludes that investment in human and physical capital was the main driving force of economic growth and that variation in output growth rates are attributable to changes in total factor productivity growth. The paper explains the decline in TFP growth after 1973 in terms of structural change in the industrial sector.

The 19th century saw the levels of income per capita of the poor economies of the western European periphery diverge from those of the first industrializers. Then during the 20th century, there was a convergence of incomes per capita within the whole continent, though this was concentrated in the years 1950–1973.1 This last period has been intensively examined in cross-country comparative studies. Yet, our understanding of the causes of convergence can be improved by looking at a longer period and the experience of individual countries. Portugal had a particularly good performance in the 20th century and caught-up to the levels of income per capita of the European core, although there was a substantial reduction in the rate of convergence after 1973.2 Traditional explanations of the growth and slowdown of the Portuguese economy have put more emphasis on internal factors. Changing policy options, Government deficits, rapid monetary expansion, and the inflation that characterized the Republican period (1910–1926) have been held responsible for economic stagnation. The accession of Salazar to the ministry of Finance, in 1928, following the military coup two years before, marked the emergence of the authoritarian Estado Novo and greater monetary and financial stability. Yet, according to some authors, that stability did not lead to higher levels of economic growth because the government imposed a rigid control of the economy through agricultural and industrial policies aimed at controlling investment, output and prices. This mirrored similar policies in contemporary fascist Italy. The industrial policies under the designation of condicionamento industrial and the wheat campaign (campanha do trigo), introduced in 1926 and 1929, as well as the first national plan for 1935–1950, are the best examples of the interventionist stance of the Estado Novo. 3

Economic historians have shown in the last decades that there is a wide diversity of economic growth experiences across countries. Different experiences stem from differences in the initial conditions for economic growth. Domestic conditions for the growth of the Portuguese economy have changed substantially, as a consequence of changes in industrial, monetary, and fiscal policies, as well as overall political conditions. Yet the external conditions for Portuguese economic growth also changed following the transformation of the European and world economy. The Portuguese economy went through a process of growth and structural transformation during the 20th century. Before World War I, Portugal was largely an agrarian economy, with about 60 per cent of the population employed in the agricultural sector. By the end of the century, the industrial and the services sectors became dominant. The sheer shift of labor from agriculture to the other sectors of the economy was a source of growth, as the labor productivity in agriculture was about half that of industry and services. This paper has put together evidence showing that high levels of investment in human and physical capital were increasingly important as instruments for rapid economic growth throughout the century.