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COVID-19 and the social distancing measures imposed to curb its spread have forced a large number of people to telework. This is a practice which has been somewhat uncommon in our society to date, but which will no doubt persist long beyond the current pandemic. The shift from going to the office – where a large number of tasks are carried out that could easily be performed remotely – to teleworking has ramifications in many areas, ranging from the purely economic to the social. In this article, we focus on the economic sphere, and particularly on the impact of teleworking on productivity.

The recent recovery in emerging currencies is being interpreted either as the beginning of a more lasting regime change or a temporary upward trend. We explore the macroeconomic fundamentals and market dynamics to determine which side has the most arguments. 

How is the economic crisis affecting the different strata of the population? Is it affecting us all equally? To what extent are the public sector support programmes cushioning the blow?

Economic activity managed to rebound firmly and across the board in Q3, but the second wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections has led to a further tightening of mobility restrictions in many countries (especially in Europe), and most indicators suggest that economic activity will contract once again in the current fourth quarter. But
how much of a contraction are we talking about?

We assess the most important points in the last-minute agreement by which, on 1 January 2021, the UK left the single market and customs union with the EU.

The COVID-19 outbreak has brought about a paradigm shift in many aspects of the economy, including consumer habits and, specifically, e-commerce in the retail sector. How have businesses that were already selling online pre-pandemic and the new entrants to this sales channel contributed to the growth in e-commerce?

Inflation has surged in early 2021, but most of the factors driving it are of a technical and temporary nature and should not affect the ECB’s monetary policy stance.

Once the pandemic is over, the very need to act decisively in monetary and fiscal terms will have repercussions that, depending on how these are managed, could affect the performance of economic policy in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a historic fall in household consumption in 2020. In the euro area, the decline reached 15.4% in Q2 of that year and stood at –8.1% for the year as a whole, with bigger reductions in the countries hardest hit by the first wave of the pandemic. Unlike previous crises, however, the declines in consumption were not accompanied by similar declines in households’ disposable income.

This is no country for young men. We see it in our environment and the data increasingly expose the reality. The labour force survey for the first quarter of the year has reminded us once again: Spain’s youth unemployment rate, the benchmark for assessing the situation of people aged under 25, remains extraordinarily high, at 40%.

We Europeans feel that economic policy failed to live up to the circumstances during the Great Recession. Some feel this way because not all the necessary reforms were carried out – and many are still pending to this day. Others feel let down because public sector support during the crisis and the subsequent recovery was insufficient. No doubt everyone is partly right, and that explains why the frustration was widespread. This time can be different. This time must be different.

As has been evident in recent weeks, there are few things more important than having a proper exit strategy once a mission comes to an end. This also applies to the economy, where the appropriateness of indefinitely maintaining the economic policy programme which, quite rightly, has been used for the past year and a half to address the crisis triggered by the pandemic is beginning to be questioned.

The first season of the COVID-19 series caught us by surprise and totally unprepared. It was short, lasting barely a few months in the major developed countries, but the experience was terrible.

Trade protectionism has been part of the new geopolitical normal for years now, but it has reached its peak in 2025 with the new US administration. In this more hostile environment and in the absence of an effective multilateral forum, the EU continues to make efforts to broaden its economic relations with different regions of the world. The strategy of diversification has become a valuable tool, not only in the search for markets with high export growth potential, but also in making progress towards the desired strategic autonomy.

For much of April, the tone in the financial markets was marked by geopolitical risks and investors’ bets about the near future of monetary policy in the major developed economies.

In this article, we analyse the consequences of the current energy crisis for electricity prices and shed some light on how it will effect electricity bills in Spain. 

GDP provides a positive surprise in Q1, with quarter-on-quarter growth of 0.7%, according to the first provisional estimate published by the country’s National Statistics Institute.This exceeds our forecast of 0.4% and, therefore, introduces upward risks to our forecast for the year as a whole, which until now has stood at 1.6%.

As the global economy’s landing is turning out to be smoother than anticipated a few months ago, the last few weeks reminded us that the environment continues to be marked by a high degree of uncertainty.

We summarise the current state and future outlook of Spain’s real estate sector, in this preview of the CaixaBank Research Real Estate Sector Report 2S 2023.

In this article, we address the sustainability challenge facing our public pension system, based on the analyses carried out by the AIReF, the European Commission and the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration.