Large Portuguese firms from the Marshall Plan to EFTA

• Autor(a) principal: Mata, Maria Eugénia
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/84984
• topic: SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth

The second half of the 1940s and the 1950s was simultaneously the period of impact of the Marshall Plan on the Portuguese economy and the epoch of take-off of modern economic growth in Portugal. This process has been studied from a macroeconomic perspective, but not from a business point of view. This is the purpose of this paper, which examines the formation of new firms, and studies the scale, scope, performance, ownership, structure and strategy of a sample of the largest firms. It shows how the Marshall aid and the government commitment to promoting economic growth and sovereignty over a vast colonial empire led to cooperation with family firms through regulation, subsidies and planning. The related and unrelated diversified-business character of informal business groups escapes Chandler’s model and his scale and scope economies, but succeeded in providing safety and mutual assistance among firms to face an increasingly competitive world.