In the next three years Spain will advance in fits and starts. Neither explosive growth nor apocalyptic crisis. Everything will continue more or less as now. A mediocre growth while others take advantage of the increase in productivity provided by the so-called digital revolution.
This is the conclusion that is revealed when analyzing the review carried out by the Bank of Spain for the period 2023-25. For this year it raises GDP growth by three tenths to 1.6%; for the following year, on the contrary, it worsens it by 4 tenths to 2.3% to end at 2.1 in 2025. Inflation will be around 4%, although food will continue to rise too much. And the unemployment? It will remain more or less as it is now, twice the rate that our neighbors have.
Productivity, that is, the wealth that we are capable of creating, will continue to stagnate. Meanwhile our debts will continue to grow, we are already at 1.5 trillion for the public administrations as a whole. It could be said that in the last three decades we have lived on borrowed money. Only since the arrival of Pedro Sánchez the debt has increased by more than 300,000 million that our children or grandchildren will have to pay. This does not seem to worry the First Vice President and Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, much less the Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, both convinced that Europe will already provide.
But neither does it seem to worry society too much, much more concerned with different identity problems than with economic ones. It is striking to see that in the recent motion of no confidence in Ramón Tamames these issues have not been present. It doesn’t matter if he’s a leading economist. Talking about productivity, debt, unemployment or poverty is boring. This explains why it has not raised the slightest interest from the audience or, of course, from the media.
The fact that a number of countries in the eastern EU such as Slovenia or the Czech Republic already have a higher per capita income than Spain is worrying. These are countries whose economies were devastated by communism and which took advantage of their entry into the EU to recover and rebuild. It is no longer just the big countries that are taking advantage of us. It is logical that Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden, which have powerful companies and a strong business class, show their might. It is that Cyprus, Malta, Finland and Austria have also left us behind.
Spain, according to Eurostat data, ranks 17th in the EU tied with Lithuania. The one that was the tenth world power already occupies the 37th place by income. And there is still more. According to the consultancy Capital Economic in the year 2050 it will fall below Nigeria, the Philippines or Mexico.
I don’t know if I believe it, but when a few weeks ago I heard the professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Jesús Fernández Villaverde, say that “Spain has been stagnant for 15 years and that at this rate we will reach 25”, alarm bells went off. In his opinion, the fiscal deficit has not been eliminated in fifteen years, the debt has continued to grow and no serious economic reform has been carried out. I don’t know if it is possible that the left-wing government can understand that nothing is free in the economy; that wealth cannot be generated by discouraging savings; that distributing aid is not synonymous with success but rather an emergency due to the lack of foresight during the expansive cycle.
It is not about pessimism, but about calling the attention of a society doped by the drug of debt. Perhaps we should talk more about productivity and less about aid.
