98% of the Spaniards who entered the labor market in Catalonia between 2019 and 2023 did so in high added value positions where the salary is above average. Instead, only 2% of Spaniards opted for precarious jobs, according to a report prepared by the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce.
Immigrants are the ones who mostly occupy the positions that the Spaniards leave free for not wanting to occupy them. In fact, there are sectors -such as hospitality or commerce- in which not only are the new positions filled entirely by immigrants, but they also replace many Spaniards who leave the sector. “The natives have stopped going to work in sectors with low added value,” says Joan Ramon Rovira, director of the studies service of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce.
Another way of analyzing this phenomenon is to see how high value-added employment with above-average salaries is distributed. In this case, Spaniards occupy 67% of the total and immigrants, the remaining 33%.
The figures of the Chamber are calculated with the data of affiliation to the Social Security in which anyone with an ID of the country is considered Spanish. On the other hand, other studies based on the EPA consider someone born outside of Spain to be an immigrant regardless of whether they have obtained Spanish nationality and, therefore, the DNI.
In this way, the affiliation data shows that from 2019 to today, 50% of the new employment in Catalonia (whatever the type) was occupied by natives and the rest by foreigners. When the same process is analyzed but with the EPA, the presence of those not born in Spain is much higher since Spanish nationalized workers are included.
The group of immigrants is very heterodox and this group also includes professionals from sectors such as health or information technology (ICT). In the first case, just over 20% of the jobs related to health were for foreigners, while in the case of ICTs it was close to 40%. Catalonia and especially Barcelona are building a powerful technology industry that attracts workers from all over the world.
In the report published yesterday by the Chamber, the entity has revised upwards the growth forecast for the Catalan economy for 2023 and 2024 to 2.2% and 2.3%, respectively, largely thanks to the foreign sector . Rovira is of the opinion that quarterly GDP growth will slow down in the second half of 2023, but he assured that this should not generate “any alarm, stagnation or problem”.
In his opinion, “the expected tightening of interest rates by the European Central Bank (ECB) has weakened” expectations
