ABSTRACT
Some scholars find economic factors to be determinant. Others offer essentially value-centered arguments, asserting that the size of the welfare state and/or the public budget is determined essentially by "national values" or "the desires of the electorate". When Portugal became a full member of the European Economic Community in 1986, it had the largest public enterprise sector in Western Europe. Yet under the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship, the opposite was true. The scope of public enterprise in Spain seems to have gone through several phases; rapid growth during the early 1940s, a gradual increase in the 1950s and 1960s, and another fairly rapid expansion during the mid-1970s. The triumph of the Socialist party in 1982 marked a surprising reversal of a forty-year trend of expansion. The history of public enterprise in Greece charts yet a third pattern. Prior to World War II, Greece, like Portugal, had very little public enterprise.
