“(…) In the summer of 1976 I got a first taste of the policy world myself, as part of a small group of MIT students sent to work for the central bank of Portugal for three months. At the time Portugal was in considerable chaos, in the aftermath of a revolution and an attempted coup; much of the challenge was simply to figure out what was going on. What I learned from that experience was the power of very simple economic ideas and simultaneously the uselessness of theories that cannot be given operational content. In particular, my experience in a country in which it was a major challenge even to decide whether output was rising or falling gave me a lasting allergy to models that tell you that a potentially useful policy exists without giving you any way to determine what that policy is. (…)”
Paul Krugman, in “Incidents from my career“.
Ainda a este propósito veja-se o contributo de João Aldeia que nos dá um “cherinho” do tal trabalho feito nos idos anos 70: “A Economia ao serviço das Esperanças de Abril“