The global crisis exposed underlying weaknesses and imbalances in the Portuguese economy, which has entered a deep recession with high unemployment. Labour market regulation had long been ill-equipped to create jobs and wide-ranging structural reforms were needed to help get the unemployed back to work and foster reallocation of labour from non-tradable to tradable sectors. International capital flows have dried up and weak growth prospects resulted in a loss of market confidence and sharply rising interest rates, despite the fact that Portugal has steadfastly implemented an ambitious three year European Union-International Monetary Fund (EU-IMF) financial assistance programme since May 2011 ().