Search results

Our forecast for 2023 headline inflation in Spain has been revised downwards, from 4.5% to 4.2%, due to the impact of the lower energy prices. However, core inflation (the sum of services and industrial products) and food inflation will remain very high.

Following a record-breaking 2022, the ECB’s interest rate hikes, coupled with the slower growth in real household disposable income, are expected to weaken the demand for housing.

Beyond housing prices, there are several indicators which show that, after years of rebalancing, the Spanish real estate sector has a reasonably clean bill of health.

The rise in food prices is proving to be more persistent than expected. In this article, we analyse the factors behind this inflationary episode and what we can expect in the short and medium term.

GDP performed better than expected in Q1 2023, rallying 1.6% quarter-on-quarter and 2.5% year-on-year thanks to the buoyancy of the foreign sector, especially tourism.

We analyse the recent evolution of China’s real estate sector, focusing on home prices, sales and the financial health of the agents involved.

The slowdown in the Portuguese real estate sector is proving less pronounced than expected, at least in terms of housing prices, and this has led us to improve the growth forecast for 2023.

With the major developed economies at the peak of a restrictive monetary policy cycle, we wonder how the US stock market has digested it.

How has spending on water, electricity and gas bills evolved over the past five years? We analyse anonymised information on direct debit payments made from CaixaBank accounts, including the key component of utilities, to understand how much effort Spanish households have had to make in paying their energy bills.

The evolution of the economy points to a change of phase: the beginning of a relaxation of monetary policy worldwide.

We analyse how the wealth of European households has evolved, comparing the major countries, using new experimental statistics published by the European Central Bank.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most disruptive and promising technologies of our time. Its ability to create, imitate and improve content of all kinds makes it a general purpose technology with a potential for economic and social transformation comparable to that of electricity or computer science. Its potential impact and how to use it in the best possible way – a major challenge for Europe and for the whole world – is what we will discuss in this article.

In this article we briefly review the main factors that have led us to slightly revise the macroeconomic outlook for 2024 and 2025.

The price of industrial metals has rebounded this year with the revival of global economic activity and the persistence of constraints on some supplies. Will this upward trend continue?

We analyse the recent trend in consumption in Spain based on data from the CaixaBank Research Real-Time Economics portal, which we have expanded with information on direct debit payments, as well as more detail on each individual sector and on the evolution of e-commerce.

In our previous article dedicated to analysing the evolution of investment in Spain, we focused on describing the pattern of investment by type of asset and by sector, and on comparing it with the euro area. In this second article, we want to focus on incentives for investment.

As we approach the end of a good year from a macroeconomic perspective, 2025 is expected to be another buoyant year for the Spanish economy thanks to a growing role of private domestic demand.

Income is the main variable that determines individuals’ economic prosperity, hence it is used to analyse economic inequality. One of the most commonly used metrics is the Gini index, due to its simplicity and ability to summarise income dispersion in a single figure.

Portugal’s National statistics Institute confirmed that the economy grew by 0.2% quarter-on-quarter in Q3 (1.9% year-on-year), with a significant contribution from domestic demand, highlighting the strength of private consumption.