The Observatory of Business Margins, promoted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and as desired by the unions as criticized by the employers, will publish its first report today. It will do so by crossing data from the Tax Agency, the National Statistics Institute (INE) and the Bank of Spain. It is the premiere promised by the Vice President and Minister of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, in what her ministry describes as an exercise to provide social agents and analysts with more and more qualitative information.
Last Monday the ministry, the Secretary of State for the Economy, Gonzalo García Andrés, called a meeting to explain to the social agents how the observatory works, but only the UGT and CC.OO attended the guests, while the employer planted the ministry. The CEOE’s opposition to this observatory is well known, since it considers it an interventionist tool that will serve to point the finger at companies, and it has even less interest now, with elections in sight.
The observatory does not require any additional information from companies and operates by adding statistics that are currently in the hands of the three aforementioned institutions, with the declared objective of promoting effective competition in the markets for goods and services and an adequate distribution of income.
The report will be published broken down by sector. In this sense, from Economy they recognize that there is a very different reliability of the data according to each sector, given that in some, especially those with an abundance of SMEs and the self-employed, there is a much smaller amount of information available.
