Portugal in the Twenty-First Century: Politics, Society, and Economics, edited by Sebastián Royo, reflects on the legacies of authoritarianism on the democratization process and addresses issues related to Portugal's integration into the European Union, with the perspective offered by its twenty-three years of membership. Portugal in the Twenty-First Century reflects on what has happened in the country and in Europe during the last three decades. The analysis is divided into two sections: political and sociological perspectives, and economic and social perspectives. The contributors identify basic changes in the economy and society of Portugal that occurred as a result of the democratization and European integration processes. They also assess the impact that these changes have had on the quality of Portuguese democracy, and on the country's economic development. Royo's collection reflects on how far Portugal has come since the Carnation Revolution in 1974 in order to better understand where it is headed now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Portugal in the Twenty-First Century: Politics, Society, and Economics, edited by Sebastián Royo, provides an original series of analyses of the development of Portuguese politics, sociology, and economics since the transition to democracy and the accession to the European Union. Drawing on the research by established scholars, Royo offers an up-to-date assessment of Portuguese political and economic issues. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding contemporary Portugal.

Portugal in the 21st Century provides a thorough yet accessible picture of contemporary Portugal in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It examines and elucidates Portugal's recent trajectory, its current position, and the main challenges it faces through an examination of the principal dimensions of cultural, economic, political, and social development in the country. Bringing together some of the foremost Portuguese experts in each of these areas, it draws on a diverse knowledge across the social sciences and humanities - including anthropologists, art historians, economists, historians, legal scholars, literary scholars, political scientists, biologists, and sociologists - to create a multidimensional portrait of contemporary Portuguese society. Key features: Organised into nine substantive chapters - each of which covers a major area of Portugal's contemporary existence - from its national identity and political system to its economy, scientific, literary, and artistic production. Opens with a general introduction providing historical context, and a chapter on Portuguese national identity. Thematic chapters focus on social, political, economic, and cultural developments of the last two decades. This book provides a comprehensive, erudite yet accessible introduction to contemporary Portugal and is essential reading for students, scholars, and readers interested in Portugal, Portuguese and Southern European politics and culture, Iberian, or Iberian-American studies and more broadly to European and Comparative Politics.

This book offers insights into the behaviour of the Portuguese economy in relation to economic growth from the twentieth century to the present. How did the 1891-92 crisis and World Wars impact Portugal economically? How did the Portuguese economy behave during the 'Golden Age' of economic growth in postwar Europe? What have the effects of the European Monetary Union been? Amaral examines long-running trends in the development of the modern Portuguese economy in order to help us understand various growth phases of the modern period. This title is important reading for economic historians and economists researching economic growth, crises, stablisation and monetary unions.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Sociology in Portugal provides the first English-language account of the history of sociology in Portugal from 1945 to the present day. Banned by the fascist regime until 1974, the institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline came relatively late. Understanding academic disciplines as institutionalized struggles over meaning, Filipe Carreira da Silva gives a genealogy of sociology in Portugal from its origins in the political-administrative interstices of a dictatorship, through the 'cyclopean moment' of the political revolution of April 1974, which brought about its swift institutionalization and subsequent consolidation in the new democratic regime, to the challenges posed by internationalization since the 1990s. Attempts to define Portugal itself, he demonstrates, have been at the heart of these struggles. Analyzing agents, institutions, contexts, instruments and ideas, Carreira da Silva shows in fascinating detail how the sociological understanding of Portugal evolved from that of a developing society in the 1960s, to that of a modernizing European social formation in the 1980s, to the post-colonial or post-imperial Portugal of today.