Of course, these are no easy times and there are no single recipes. Becoming a market economy is not just about privatizing public companies, opening financial markets to the world and deregulating every single market from one day to the next. Unfortunately, both countries learned this the hard way.
Indeed, the decline in loans is concentrated in the segment of small and mediumsized enterprises. In contrast, loans to both state-owned enterprises and to the largest private sector corporations have been increasing, as these corporations are replacing credit previously obtained abroad with loans taken from Portugal-based institutions.