José Reis

The Asymmetries of European Integration and the Crisis of Capitalism in Portugal

This article analyses the crisis of Portuguese capitalism within the wider crisis of the Eurozone. Portugals prolonged economic stagnation, associated with an increasingly dependent and fragile insertion in the Eurozone, can now be seen as an early manifestation of the asymmetries and fractures between the Eurozones core and its periphery that are now wider and more visible. By focusing on the manifestations of ‘embedded neoliberalism’ in a country of the periphery, the article sheds light on how neoliberal restructuring has made the economic structure increasingly incompatible with the social developments that had previously helped to guarantee its legitimacy. The troikas structural adjustment reveals that this incompatibility is now fully assumed and that, in the absence of social resistance, the brunt of adjustment will be felt by the majority of workers.

How "Rural" Is Agricultural Pluriactivity?.

Abstract This paper questions the adequacy of the traditional approach to the study of agricultural pluriactivity which tends to be set within a narrow agricultural framework and assumes a descriptive nature. The basic argument is that an explanatory approach to contemporary forms of agricultural pluriactivity has to be informed by the process of capitalist restructuring and social change. This paper starts with a general analysis of the changing modes of the economic relations and then focuses on labour force reproduction structures. These are seen as most relevant in the context of a ‘semiperipheral’ society such as Portugal. It is concluded that although agricultural pluriactivity is clearly ‘rural’ in its origins, it contributes to, and gradually becomes part of, a wider process of change which transforms its very nature and blurs its original ‘rural’ boundaries.

Marshallian Industrial Districts in Portugal: A Conceptual Solution for Empirical Analyses’ Pressures

This is a unique and detailed book which surveys the diffusion and reception of Alfred Marshall’s ideas and the ways they have influenced the development of economic science up to the present day.