Structures and trends of the worldly economic growth

Abstract

The conception of capitalism as a worldly system of accumulation and asymetrical growth of social formations structured and hierarchized at the international scale has been thrown into an increasing relief in the analyses of development and underdevelopment, as it is the case namely in the works by André Gunder Frank and Samir Amin. The transformation «laws» or trends of that system seem to be more significant and deep than the regularities only identifiable within the national spaces, mainly one tries to understand the evolution logic of the social formations called peripheric or underdeveloped. The aim of this article is to synthetize a large and empirical information available today about certain long term trends in the evolution of the system and to draw some conclusions relevant for the «localization» of the Portuguese processus within that larger space. More exactly, one tries to put in contrast the worldly capitalist system in the phase of the British hegemony, closed in World War I, to the present phase of North-American hegemony, placing certain main aspects of the historical set of problems concerning Portuguese underdevelopment in the first case and in the second one. In the conclusion, one says that the present phase of transition in the Portuguese social formation may be interpreted, taking into account the present force relations in the homeland, as the preparation of the political and economic conditions suitable for the placing of Portuguese economy in the present logic of the capitalist international division of work.