Table 1.

Background information of the troika and the bailout programme

Troika	Bailout	General objectives: Bailout
Troika’s sovereign creditors & decision group [40]:  ▪ European Central Bank (ECB)  ▪ European Commission (EC)  ▪ International Monetary Fund (IMF) Economic Adjustment Programme for Portugal:  ▪ Memorandum of Understanding on Specific Economic Policy Conditionality (MoU)  ▪ Technical Memorandum of Understanding (TMU)  ▪ Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies (MEFP)	• €4.7billion cuts of public expenditure by 2014 [6] • Cuts predominantly in health care, education and social security  ▪ Education:   ▪ Reduction in spending by 23% from 2010 to 2012  ▪ Social security:   ▪ Family allowance for families with children was reduced to 44.60€ per month (2010) • In healthcare mainly on: drug expenditure, workforce and user charges • Workforce:   ▪ Further cuts of 30.000 jobs in the public sector (2013)   ▪ Salary freezes (2010)   ▪ Income cuts (2011–2012) ▪ Drug expenditure:   ▪ Decrease from 1.55% (2010) to 1.25% (2012) and 1% (2013) of GDP   ▪ Savings in public retail pharmaceutical expenditure:    ▪ reductions in pricing    ▪ promotion of competition    ▪ electronic prescribing    ▪ prescription monitoring ▪ User charges increase   ▪ Primary care: from 2.25€ to €5.00€   ▪ Emergency visits for:    ▪ Primary care: 3.40€ (2007) to 10.35€ (2014)    ▪ Secondary care: 8.75€ to (2007) 20.65€ (2014) [11, 44, 66]	▪ Structural reforms: [44, 45]   • enhance growth   • generate employment   • increase competitiveness ▪ A fiscal consolidation strategy   • enhanced financial control over public-private-partnerships and state-owned enterprises   • decreasing public debt and deficit reducing the deficit below 3% of GDP by 2014 ▪ A financial sector strategy   • to protect the financial sector against deleverage