Under the old regime, Portugal's private sector was dominated by some forty prominent families. These industrial dynasties were allied by marriage with the large, traditional landowning families of the nobility, who held most of the arable land in the southern part of the country in large estates. Many of these dynasties had business interests in Portuguese Africa. Within this elite group, the top ten families owned all the important commercial banks, which in turn controlled a disproportionate share of the economy. Because bank officials were often members of the boards of directors of borrowing firms in whose stock the banks participated, the influence of the large banks extended to a host of commercial, industrial, and service enterprises. Portugal's shift toward a moderately outward-looking trade and financial strategy, initiated in the late 1950s, gained momentum during the early 1960s. Until that time the country remained very poor and largely underdeveloped; although the country had a disadvantaged starting position, three decades of the "Estado Novo" regime had done no better than slightly increasing the country's GDP per capita from 36 percent of EC-12 average in 1930 to 39 percent in 1960. By the late 1950s, a growing number of industrialists, as well as government technocrats, favored greater Portuguese integration with the industrial countries to the north, as a badly needed stimulus to Portugal's economy. The influence of the Europe-oriented technocrats was rising within Salazar's cabinet. This was confirmed by the substantial increase in the foreign investment component in projected capital formation between the first (1953–58) and second (1959–64) economic development plans; the first plan called for a foreign investment component of less than 6 percent, but the latter envisioned a 25 percent contribution.