n.38 imprese e storia 121 Large Portuguese firms from the Marshall Plan to EFTA: Early stirrings of Managerial Capitalism? — Eugenia Mata 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 sov- ereignty over a vast colonial empire led to cooperation with family firms through regula- tion, subsidies and planning. The related and unrelated diversified-business character of informal business groups escapes Chandler’s model and his scale and scope econo- mies, but succeeded in providing safety and mutual assistance among firms to face an increasingly competitive world. JEL classification: Keywords: 1. Portugal in the Golden Age of economic growth The period of the Marshall Plan was a crucial moment for the take-off of modern economic growth in Portugal. This is true from a macroeconomic perspective, as the evidence of national accounting shows, and also from a microeconomic perspective, as this paper seeks to demonstrate. Several indus- trial sectors flourished, and family groups prospered. The paper discusses if the period between the Marshall Plan and EFTA accession may be envisioned as the first moment of managerial capitalism in Portugal. This was the oppor- tunity for experiencing rates of growth that were higher than ever in the past, paving the way to an exceptional performance during the 1960s. Although in the Usa the managerial revolution took place in the period between the 1880s and the Great Depression, bringing giant industrial corporations to the forefront of American capitalism, in the large European countries the First World War interrupted similar paths for different national profiles of managerial capitalism 1 . Occasionally conclusions from Chandler’s 1 A. Chandler Jr., 1990.