State, Market and Community: The Portuguese Economy in The Networks of Contemporary Governance

Abstract

The Portuguese economy registered several significant transformations in recent decades, after the democratic revolution (1974) and the EEC accession (1986). A deep integration in the EU and an original and unexpected context of Iberian integration are important elements of the new picture. The changes in specialization, the emergence of a public service economy, the centrality of financial external relations, and the new condition of Portugal as a net foreign investor and as a country of immigration are some of the main processes that are relevant for the analysis of Portuguese economic governance in this period. This analysis involves studying the mechanisms of coordination of collective action. The State, as the agent of the ‘relational order’, the market, as an increasingly narrow place of governance, and the community, as the expression of Portuguese specificities, are considered in this paper as major institutional arrangements and the bases of economic governance.