cal town hall officials and businesspersons, as well as a number of politicians with wider responsibilities and power. Nevertheless the Transparency International report for 2010 places Portugal in 31st position in terms of perceived corruption, just below Israel and Spain, and 34 positions above Italy.
A report published in January 2011 by the Diário de Notícias, a leading Portuguese newspaper, demonstrated that in the period between the Carnation Revolution in 1974 and 2010, the democratic Portuguese Republic governments encouraged over expenditure and investment bubbles through unclear public-private partnerships. This funded numerous ineffective and unnecessary external consultancy and advising committees and firms, allowed considerable slippage in state-managed public works, inflated top management and head officers' bonuses and wages, causing a persistent and lasting recruitment policy that boosted the number of redundant public servants. The economy was also damaged by risky credit, public debt creation and mismanaged European structural and cohesion funds for almost four decades. Apparently, the Prime Minister Sócrates's cabinet was not able to forecast or prevent any of this when symptoms first appeared in 2005, and in 2011 the country was on the verge of bankruptcy.
If analysed under a wider time span, the convergence of the Portuguese economy to EU levels has been impressive, especially from 1986 to the early 2000s (decade). According to Barry (2003), "what appears to have been crucial in the Portuguese case, relative to Spain at least, is the degree of labour-market flexibility that the economy exhibits. (...) Thus Portuguese convergence has been impressive, even though, consistent with its relatively low human-capital stock, the economy has specialised in low-tech production."
On April 6, 2011 Prime Minister José Sócrates announced on national television that the country would request financial assistance from the IMF and the
