The institutional environment of Portuguese banking during the Golden Age years of economic growth (1950-1973) has been criticized in many instances, at the time and in recent literature. Direct observers of the period as well as historians have stressed two main aspects of that environment: on...

The two most important international databases with Portuguese GDP per capita and productivity from the 1950s onwards (GGDC and Ameco) offer two contrasting pictures of the evolution of the economy, especially during the slowdown period between 1973 and the mid-1980s. The main problem is the low...

Most of the literature on the interventions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Portugal points to the June 1978 Stand-by arrangement (SBA) between the Portuguese authorities and the IMF as being the first such intervention (Nunes, 2010, Lopes, 1982 and 1996, Pinto, 1983, Schmitt, 1981,...

On 25 April 1974, a military coup toppled Western Europe’s oldest dictatorship, Portugal’s Estado Novo. The following years were characterized by political and economic instability with a wage explosion and the reduction of working hours for the country’s labor force, the expropriation of...