Paper short abstract:

In order to understand the impact of the new rural development ideas on public policy, one should monitor the budgetary evolution of agriculture. Considering that the colonies’ budgets were mere propaganda tools, the new ideas impact over the political priorities of the regime should be reassessed.

Paper long abstract:

The reflection about the innovating ideas and practices, after the Second World War, in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, would be incomplete without analyzing the impact of those innovations upon the colonial policy. In so doing, a quantitative methodology founded on the public finances study was chosen. Since the majority of the public policies registered in the Portuguese colonies' financial year accounts under the designation of public expenditure, sometimes in absolute terms, some others in relative terms, is underestimated, thus not corresponding to the real public financial flows which permitted their implementation ; we shall here try and carry out a comparative analysis between the figures registered in the official financial documents as agricultural policy and an alternative version of those figures, closer to the reality, which reassess the weight of agriculture within the colonial public policies' framework by considering a set of public expenses which had not been registered in the colonies' financial year accounts and that, in spite of not having been the object of study by academics focused on the Portuguese colonial public policies of the twentieth century third quarter, were indispensable for government and colonies' public administration. The comparative analysis of the position occupied by the agricultural sector of both official and corrected versions in the hierarchy of the colonial government's priorities will prove that the new ideas and practices introduced in the imperial rural space after 1945 did not have the expected impact on the financial allocation of resources implemented by the Portuguese colonial policy.