The Valencian Community is far behind Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country in all the variables related to private investment in technology, it invests more in real estate assets and less in ICT and RD, that is, companies do not bet on the economy of the knowledge. The autonomy has a productive system biased towards the least digitized sectors and its productivity is the most backward of all the communities.
This is the depressing summary that Matilde Mas, a researcher at the Valencian Institute for Economic Research (Ivie), made yesterday in Alicante of the report ‘Technology as a growth engine’ that the organization has produced and was presented at the Banco de Sabadell Auditorium. In fact, for Mas, the positive note of the study is “that we recognize our problems and thus we can begin to solve them.”
Contrary to what is often asserted from political power, the researcher does not believe that the solution lies in a change in the Valencian production model. “Our conclusion is no, that doesn’t change anything,” she says. According to the study, in the Community there is the circumstance that the traditional sectors (tourism, construction, textiles) grow in the most inefficient way, “by perspiration, by sweat, based on effort in people and machines, while the virtuous way is by inspiration, using knowledge, taking advantage of technical progress”.
Therefore, it would not be so much a question of devoting oneself to something else, such as “aeronautics”, but of doing well, investing in knowledge and technology, what is already done. “Why does tourism in the Valencian Community perform so badly?” Mas wondered, “because it is a very heterogeneous sector in which the weight of beach bars and cocktail bars is very large, and this coexists with hotel chains that are very efficient, that base their improvement on digitization and invest in ICT”.
Once the diagnosis has been made, where should the solutions be directed? “You have to do what leaders do, which is invest in technology and knowledge, because what matters is not so much investing as knowing what to invest in, and what training is given to workers so that they get the most out of resources that they have and thus improve the productivity of the companies”, responds Mas.
Another of the problems exposed by the Ivie research refers to training: in Spain in general, and in the Valencian Community in particular, “people with medium studies have less weight, who are the ones who are most incorporated into the job market “Here we have a lot of university students and even more of those who only have basic studies. With such an unbalanced structure, we have an excess of overqualification that does not occur in France or Germany”, explains Mas.
The researcher points out that “we have a very serious problem, the disconnect between the educational system and the needs of companies.” And she laments the shortage of STEM graduates (engineering, architecture, science, mathematics…) careers that should be attracting more students and are increasingly doing so. And they have not just captured women, “this is a waste of resources, apart from the fact that it deceives students, who should think about job placement, that these sectors are where employment is,” concludes Mas.
