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The vaccination of the population at risk, the containment of any further outbreaks and the implementation of the Digital Green Certificate will be key factors in tourism improving its performance significantly during the second half of 2021.

The Spanish economy has a diverse, export-oriented and highly productive manufacturing sector. However, the business fabric is still highly fragmented compared to German industry, a European benchmark. Increasing company size and the productivity of companies, through investment in R&D and adopting new digital technologies, and moving towards Industry 4.0 are key in the increasing competitiveness of a fundamental sector for the economy and for the Spanish foreign sector. The sector must also evolve towards a more sustainable industrial model: only companies that successfully undertake the energy transition will be able to compete in a new environment in which sustainability will be a prerequisite for continuing to operate in the market.

Europe’s economic response to the COVID-19 crisis took shape in July: the European Council approved the Recovery Plan for Europe, the so-called NGEU, via which the European Union will grant up to 750 billion euros to its member states to stimulate their economic recovery after the shock of the pandemic. This is an unprecedented agreement and it could have a considerable impact on Europe’s real estate sector since one of the EU’s main goals, to which this Recovery Plan aims to contribute significantly, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. It is clear that renovating Europe’s buildings, which are responsible for 40% of the continent’s energy consumption, will be key to achieving this climate target.

Technology is advancing at a frenetic pace and offers the agrifood chain a large number of opportunities to make its production more efficient and sustainable. Moreover, the arrival of COVID-19 has shown that the most digitalised companies were able to continue their activities more readily than the rest. In this article we examine the degree of popularity of the different digital technologies used in the primary sector and agrifood industry based on a text analysis of over 2 million tweets on Twitter. All these technologies are essential to create a connected ecosystem that will make up the Food Chain 4.0 of the future.

Commercial real estate performed very well in the first half of 2022 but this situation is changing rapidly in the wake of the sharp hike in interest rates implemented by the ECB to curb the advance of inflation. All the evidence seems to suggest that office property may see the largest adjustment in valuation terms as this has the narrowest yields. Retail, whose valuations have already suffered several years of intense adjustment, could now become more stable than the rest of the segments. On the other hand, logistics assets, the star product lately due to the boom in e-commerce, may be more sensitive to any deterioration in the macroeconomic environment. Finally, we look at the co-living segment which has been attracting a lot of investor interest recently in Spain, especially in the case of senior living, a segment with very positive prospects considering the demographic outlook that will support demand in the medium and long term and the current limited supply.

In June 2016, the United Kingdom’s vote in favour of leaving the European Union (EU) opened up a new scenario for the British economy that could have important repercussions for the Spanish economy and particularly for the tourism industry, which receives around 16 million British tourists a year1. In this article we examine the impact of Brexit on the number of British tourists visiting Spain and its potential impact in the future under different EU exit scenarios.

2020 will go down in history as the year of COVID but it will also be remembered that, faced by a very difficult situation, the response provided by the food chain was extraordinary, guaranteeing an uninterrupted supply to all Spanish households. A year and a half later, the primary sector still looks remarkably dynamic, although the exceptional growth rates posted during the most critical months of the pandemic have now been left behind.

This article analyses the recent dynamics in Spain’s rental market based on internal CaixaBank data on direct debit payments for residential rents. According to our indicators, annual rent price increases are moderate when there is no change of tenant or landlord, generally lying below 3% and close to inflation, and consistent with regulatory caps. In contrast, the pressure on the price of new rental contracts has increased, closing 2025 with growth in excess of 10% year-on-year. Despite this, the median cost burden remains stable at around 30%, although there is still significant inequality between age groups and greater pressure in large cities.

The initiation of the ECB’s monetary policy normalisation process has led to an acceleration in house prices, especially in markets with a significant mismatch between insufficient supply and dynamic demand. The economies in which real prices have increased the most in the last year and a half, and where the residential markets are showing signs of more significant overvaluation, include Portugal, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Estonia. In contrast, the markets of large economies such as Germany, Sweden, France and Luxembourg remain overvalued, but have corrected the strong price growth they experienced in the decades leading up to the pandemic, reducing signs of overheating.

The outlook for the Spanish economy as a whole is highly dependent on the trends in inflationary pressures, especially those related to energy. The primary sector was already suffering from rising production costs and the war in Ukraine has merely aggravated the situation.