Improving the visibility of the economy’s performance in the short term remains fraught with significant challenges in the medium term, in an environment in which we will see major transformations in the coming years.
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Since the outbreak of the pandemic, household consumption has grown by an average of 2.0% annually in real terms, almost in line with its historical rate and the growth of the overall economy. The consumption of durable goods, in contrast, has grown at double that rate: 4.0% annually.
The Spanish economy successfully navigated the trade and geopolitical tensions affecting the global environment in 2025, achieving growth of 2.8%. This figure clearly surpasses both our forecast at the start of year, which was 2.3%, and the euro area’s growth, which stood at 1.5%. This GDP growth was driven by the momentum of domestic demand, which offset the deterioration of external demand resulting from the surge in imports.
On 30 June 2023, the publication of data on the USD LIBOR, the interest rate at which banks lent US dollars to each other, was ceased. This was not a sudden end, as the relevant authorities had been warning since 2017 of the need to abandon the LIBOR in favour of another benchmark, the SOFR. In this article we explain what these acronyms refer to and which are the differences between them.
The generation gap is widening in both income and wealth, according to the latest Spanish Survey of Household Finances published by the Bank of Spain: between 2001 and 2021, the median income of households with a head of the household aged under 35 fell by 19.8%, while in the case of those over 74 years of age it rose by 40.5%; and between 2002 and 2022 the total net wealth of households with a head under the age of 35 fell by 72.7%, while that of households headed by someone over the age of 74 rose by 98.7%.
2025 should be the year of monetary policy untightening, with the ECB and the Fed lowering their interest rates to neutral levels (around 2% and 3%, respectively). These rate cuts will be accompanied by another, less visible normalisation: the reduction of their balance sheets, which have grown exponentially in the last 15 years.
The volatility in commodity prices since the outbreak of the pandemic continues to be a key factor for the economic outlook, given the implications for production costs and the prices consumers pay.
One of the hot economic topics of today is the impact that a tightening of the financial conditions will have on the cost of Spanish public debt. Since the beginning of the year, we have witnessed a rebound in euro area sovereign yields and in risk premiums of the periphery, including that of Spain. Thus, the question arises as to how sensitive the general government’s cost of financing will be to a changing and highly uncertain macro-financial environment.
The global economy sustains the momentum, but pockets of instability persist. The US faces the impact of the longest shutdown in its history; the euro area holds up but lacks momentum, and China’s slowdown is accentuated at the end of the year.
In this fourth and last article of the Dossier “Solidarity in Spain: snapshot of a committed society”, we analyse, in collaboration with Pompeu Fabra University, the change in the aggregate volume and in the number of donations that were made after the floods in Valencia based on CaixaBank banking transactions in order to better understand the charitable response to this emergency.
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 explore some of the pension reforms implemented in other countries which, according to the economic literature and various international organisations, have best managed to navigate the uncertainty involved in ensuring the sustainability of the pension system.
We analyse the post-pandemic recovery of tourism from one of the Portuguese economy’s star source markets: the US.
The support of economic policies, coupled with the expectation of economic recovery in 2021, has been key to explaining the markets' performance in 2020. As a result, future developments in the pandemic, the economy's capacity to recover and the protection afforded to businesses by such policies will continue to set the tone for the financial markets in 2021.
The pandemic's economic impact has been considerable and widespread but it has not affected all regions equally. We analyse the impact of the different degrees of lockdown on the most vulnerable groups and the role played by the public sector in alleviating this.
We assess the situation of risk premia in the euro area periphery and the tools available to the ECB (flexible reinvestments under the PEPP and TPI) to curb their rise.
Looking ahead to 2026, geopolitics will continue to play a fundamental role, bearing in mind the reordering of the globalisation process in which the international economy has been immersed since the pandemic. Furthermore, the economy will continue to be exposed to the combination of new underlying trends (restrictions on trade and migration movements, AI boom, etc.) and short-term challenges (limited fiscal space, high valuations in financial markets, etc.).
The new Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation («PERTE» project) approved by the government in May could provide a boost to the Spanish automotive industry, one of the hardest hit by the current shortage of microchips, which are increasingly necessary for the production of electric vehicles.