Starting in the early-1960s, Portugal entered in a period of robust economic growth and structural modernisation, owing to a liberalisation of the economy. As an expression of such economic opening, in 1960 the country was one of the EFTA founding member states. Yearly growth rates sometimes with two digits, allowed the Portuguese GDP per capita to reach 56% of the EC-12 average by 1973. This growth period eventually ended in the mid-1970s, for that contributing the 1973 oil crisis and the political turmoil following the 25 April 1974 coup which led to the transition to democracy. From 1974 to the late-1970s, over one million Portuguese citizens arrived from the former African overseas territories, most as destitute refugees—the "retornados". After nearly a decade of economic troubles, during which Portugal received two IMF-monitored bailouts, in 1986 the country entered the European Economic Community (and left the EFTA). The European Union's structural and cohesion funds and the growth of many of Portugal's main exporting companies were leading forces in a new period of robust economic growth and socio-economic development which would last (though with a short crisis around 1992–94) to the early-2000s. In 1991, GDP per capita surpassed the 1973 level and by 2000 it had achieved 70% of the EU-12 average, which nonetheless constituted an approach to the Western European standards of living without precedents in the centuries before. Similarly, for several years Portuguese subsidiaries of large multinational companies ranked among the most productive in the world. However, the economy has been stagnated since the early-2000s and was heavily hit by the effects of the Great Recession, which eventually led to an IMF/EU-monitored bailout from 2011-14.