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Portugal’s growth in the first quarter of the year fell short of expectations, shrinking 0.5% quarter-on-quarter according to the preliminary estimate of Portugal’s National Statistics Institute.

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.

Central banks are now accelerating the tightening of financial conditions in an attempt to eliminate demand-side pressures, at least while supply remains subject to all kinds of obstacles.

In these first few months of the year, Spain’s GDP has continued to grow at a significant rate, although the gap between the services and industrial sectors persists. Job creation is gaining traction, while inflation continues to decline, driven by the fall in energy prices. The trade deficit continued to increase in February and residential activity in Spain has had the best start to the year since 2007.

News related to the supply problems (or bottlenecks) within global value chains have been a permanent fixture of recent months. The temporary shutdown of some car plants due to the lack of chips and difficulties in the Black Friday or Christmas campaigns due to delays in the arrival of shipping containers are some of the best known examples. In this article, we analyse what is causing these problems and, looking ahead to 2022, how long they could last.

We analyse individual CaixaBank customers’ direct debit electricity bill payments in order to understand how Spanish households’ electricity bills have evolved in 2022.

The outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, and more recently the war in Ukraine, has accelerated the trend of decoupling between the US and China, and Europe also appears to have joined in, albeit somewhat timidly for now. We analyse the EU’s dependence on China in order to understand whether European strategic autonomy is possible, or even desirable.

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. 

A new indicator of the monthly expenditure at petrol stations using anonymised data from CaixaBank customers shows us how we have adapted our fuel consumption to the rise in prices.

To assess the extent to which demand for housing could be affected by the rise in interest rates, we calculate the expected trend in the theoretical mortgage burden ratio according to our current CaixaBank Research forecast scenario, recently revised following the invasion of Ukraine.

A real-time analysis of wage incomes shows that, in 2022, the impact which the pandemic had on inequality has been undone and that it now stands at a very similar level to that which existed prior to the pandemic. 

The global economy will therefore continue to face major challenges in 2023, given the disruptive dynamics that continue to be present. With the unknowns regarding the performance of the Chinese economy and the evolution of the conflict in Ukraine, minimising the damage inflicted on the labour market by the current cycle of monetary tightening, as well as keeping the financial channel isolated from the noise, will be essential.

The beginning of 2025, with a month of January marked by contrasts, exemplifies how political and geo-economic risks can continue to steer the market.

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.

Broadly speaking, there are three key factors which define the new macroeconomic picture of the Spanish economy that we have elaborated here at CaixaBank Research, and which are shared by most of the institutions that have updated their forecasts.

Although the storm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is not yet over, we can already analyse what impact the response from the public administrations has had on wage inequality. Public sector payments to workers on furlough or those unemployed cushioned the fall in income for many workers, but to what extent did they dampen the rise in inequality? Internal CaixaBank data allow us to answer this question already, as well as allowing us to assess what would be the implications of greater efficiency in the management of these benefits.

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.