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The saying goes that better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, but perhaps inflation is a special case. What will happen with inflation in 2023?

For the first time in many months, the outlook for the European economy has begun to improve. We analyse the factors behind this improvement and share our vision of the outlook for growth and inflation in the euro area in 2023. 

In recent quarters, the global economy has shown remarkable resilience and we estimate that it could have grown by around 3.0% in 2023. With this starting point, we explain the latest revision to our global economic forecast scenario and the outlook for monetary policy.

Spain included 28.4 billion euros from the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, NGEU’s main instrument, in the 2022 General Government Budget. Have expectations been met? Are the investments and reforms being implemented as planned?

The umpteenth change in the economic narrative in recent months – this time going from soft landing to no landing – appears to work in favour of the central banks’ intention to stay on the current course, to continue to raise rates and, once the peak is reached, to remain in restrictive territory for longer than previously expected.

Five months after the last update to our macroeconomic forecast scenario, we have incorporated newly available information and re-examined the main factors dominating the outlook for Spain’s economy.

We break down the causes of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, and also its consequences: from the fall of Credit Suisse to the impact on investor expectations and banking stocks.

CaixaBank Research forecasts growth of 1.4% for 2024, but this year we are pointing out the risks to the upside. The good growth data for Q4 2023 and the improvement in the outlook for household consumption will lead us to revise our growth forecast and place it close to 2.0%.

While in December 2022 our GDP growth forecast for 2023 was 1%, finally the Spanish economy has managed to grow by an impressive 2.5%, in spite of the geopolitical uncertainty, persistent high inflation (despite its decline in recent months) and rising interest rates.

Preliminary GDP data published by the National Statistics Institute indicate a notable acceleration in growth in the final quarter of 2023, with an increase of 0.8% quarter-on-quarter and 2.2% year-on-year in Q4. 

In an environment marked by geopolitical uncertainty, high interest rates and cooling global demand, the major advanced economies ended 2023 more resilient than had been anticipated a few quarters ago,

With the announcement of Libra, Facebook have put the debate about cryptocurrencies and the operation of existing payment systems back on the agenda. After the fall in the value of Bitcoin and doubts about its ability to function as money, many see stablecoins as an alternative with greater potential for adoption.

Finance is a key sector for the economy. Therefore, any significant innovation in this field deserves to be analysed with caution, and its implications, well understood. This is what we seek to do in this article with the Libra project.

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in Spanish firms has accelerated in recent years, but the process has been uneven and remains incomplete. This article analyses the extent of AI penetration considering four key dimensions: company size, sectoral differences, specific uses within organisations and the main barriers hindering its deployment, as well as a comparison with the rest of Europe. Understanding how and where AI is being incorporated is particularly important from a business and macroeconomic perspective, as its adoption influences efficiency and productivity gains and can widen gaps between firms, sectors and workers in a productive fabric like Spain’s, which is dominated by SMEs and microenterprises.

The Industrial Accelerator Act, presented by the European Commission at the beginning of March, outlines its response to the EU’s weakening industrial base. It is structured around a set of quantitative objectives: a general one, to raise the sector’s share of the economy to 20% of GDP by 2035 (14% in 2025), and several specific ones, aimed at boosting productive capacity and reducing strategic dependencies in critical segments. In pursuit of this latter goal, it includes minimum European content requirements and maximum thresholds for third countries in terms of foreign direct investment and public procurement.