The pandemic has highlighted the strategic nature of the agrifood industry as an essential activity to supply the population with food. The sector has therefore been one of the least affected by the crisis: the primary sector's relative share of the total economy increased and the agrifood industry posted a much smaller decline than manufacturing industry as a whole in Q2 2020. Labour market trends have also been relatively favourable, with relatively few job losses and a smaller proportion of workers affected by furlough measures.
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This year and the next, the Spanish economy will enjoy strong expansionary momentum, supported by robust domestic demand and competitive advantages over its main European partners. Despite a challenging global environment, we forecast GDP growth of 2.9% in 2025 and 2.1% in 2026, supported by, among other factors, improved financial conditions supporting continued growth in private consumption and investment, population growth and relatively competitive energy costs. The sectoral analysis also reveals a broad-based expansionary cycle, which ranges from the best-performing sectors such as construction and pharmaceuticals to those that will grow at a more moderate pace, e.g. textiles and motor vehicles.
The pharmaceutical industry is a key and strategic sector for Spain’s economy, as was clearly demonstrated by the pandemic. In the past 25 years, the sector has become hugely significant and an important driver of Spanish exports and private R&D investment. Nevertheless, its production capacity still has room for improvement. The future of Spanish industry should be more closely linked to the pharmaceutical sector with a commitment to promote its growth, not only for strategic purposes but also for purely economic reasons, since it is an extremely competitive industry with a great capacity to generate good quality jobs that would help to modernise Spain’s economy.
Now, although the ECB has tightened the conditions required for an interest rate hike, there are more factors to support the idea that medium-term inflation could lie at 2%, and after more than a decade without doing so the ECB may finally raise interest rates.
Despite the expected reduction in the deficit to around 5.0% of GDP in 2022, the Treasury’s funding needs will remain high. This leads to the question of whether it could experience difficulties in capturing this funding now that the ECB has announced that it will be reducing its purchases of public debt.
How has the demand for technological goods in Spain evolved? We analyse what has happened according to different sociodemographic segments through the use of duly anonymised internal CaixaBank data.
The start of 2025 has brought a change in the focus of the financial markets, which was consolidated in February. Investors have shifted their attention away from the central banks, which were the main driver of the markets in 2024, towards an environment of high geopolitical risk, with the «Trump effect» as a key catalyst.
After using our consumption indicator to analyse the data on expenditure at petrol stations paid for with CaixaBank customer bank cards, we once again found that not all consumers reacted equally to the rise in fuel prices.
The indicators that have been published during the opening months of the year paint a picture of a buoyant Spanish economy in Q1 2025, albeit with a slightly less vigorous growth rate than in the previous quarter.
In his first six weeks in the White House, President Trump has succeeded in disrupting the world order repeatedly. On the trade policy front, uncertainty will cloud the economic outlook in the short and medium term, and the risk of protectionist escalation is high.
Having overcome the crisis triggered by the pandemic, which caused debt-to-GDP levels to skyrocket, debt ratios have now resumed the downward trajectory they were on prior to COVID. In particular, in the private sector, both businesses and households already have lower levels of debt than before the pandemic and much lower than they had during the financial crisis of 2008. All this, together with the greater weight of fixed-rate debt, puts them in a less vulnerable position to cope with the rise in interest rates.
We summarise the current situation and future outlook for the Spanish tourism sector, as set out in the Tourism Sector Report S1 2023, in this preview from the September edition of the CaixaBank Research Monthly Report.
The 20 economies that make up the Euro area have a single currency with a common monetary policy and, implicitly, a fixed exchange rate. However, in the last two years the region has suffered significant discrepancies in the inflation rates of its member countries. What is behind this dispersion?
The Spanish economy is growing at a good pace – more so than expected – and this leads us here at CaixaBank Research to revise our growth forecasts for 2025 upwards from 2.3% to 2.5%. Despite the good news, the focus is not on the improvement in the forecasts, but rather on the uncertainty that surrounds them.