This title refers to ¿Qué hacer con Espanya?, a good book that César Molinas published ten years ago. Our country was trying to get its head out of the depths of an economic crisis that made us wake up abruptly from a dream that began with the transition and led us to integrate into the euro as privileged students. Getting out of a collapsed economy required smart recipes and determined bets. Molinas proposed to reform a “chaste” capitalism, based on relations with political power and on the regulations of the BOE rather than on competitiveness, redirecting it towards an economy focused on activities with more added value. It was not the only proposal, there were others such as that of Luis Garicano, who made similar suggestions in El dilema de España from a liberal perspective, including a rationalization of the public sector.
Both agreed on the idea that attention should be focused on an education that would allow the new generations to face the challenges of the knowledge economy with the right background. Along with this, by boosting investment in R&D, the foundations of a more productive and competitive economy would be established. The situation ten years later is that we came out of the worst of that crisis with a constant rate of job creation that has made it possible to reduce unemployment rates from 26% to the current 12%. But we have done it by creating jobs with low added value, maintaining an unacceptable youth unemployment rate of 28% and losing positions in productivity.
Can we talk about a lost decade? Our country is not an outcast now like it was in 2013. We are better than then. But the essential remains pending. Rajoy’s government limited itself to the labor and banking reforms dictated by Europe. He completed them and they gave the intended results. However, the immobility that characterized its leader meant that it did not go further and Spain lost an excellent opportunity to reinvent itself.
His successor, Pedro Sánchez, had the issue of productivity very much on his agenda. This is how he explained it the first time he came as president to the annual meeting of the Economic Circle in 2019. But the impossibility of agreeing with Citizens, the “insomnias” of the coalition with Podemos, the pandemic and the inflationary environment associated with the war in Ukraine have once again left reformist plans off the political agenda.
This legislature begins marked by the deafening amnesty frenzy that once again makes us lose focus and the possibility of agreeing on the reforms we need most. In socio-economic matters, the most noteworthy is the proposal to reduce the working day to 37.5 hours per week. Our second vice president has stated that this would make us more productive. A surprising statement, when even the most educated in the field know that the order of the factors is just the opposite. A much more productive environment could allow us to consider a reduction in working hours, but this is not the case.
A new book entitled Un país posible, coordinated by the ex-deputy and director of Esade EcPol, Toni Roldán, puts the finger in the sore by highlighting Spain’s loss of position in the last two decades. Again, education, R&D and productivity are the pending subjects of our economy. But we remain unfocused and with no other social commitment than to work less, as if this were progressive, when progress is about better training our young people by providing them with the right tools and productive environment to work better.
