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September saw Q3 end with widespread gains in the financial markets. The cuts by central banks have prolonged the falls in money market rates and global stock markets have enjoyed a rally.

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.

Wage incomes per employee increased by an average of 2.4% year-on-year in May according to our wages indicator. Are low-income workers’ wages growing at the same rate as those of high-income workers?

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,

Debates about inequality often focus on dispersion in wage levels and omit one very important aspect: inequality in wage income also depends on the «intensity» of employment, that is, on whether people are working at all and, if so, how frequently. Spain is a prime example, with a high rate of temporary employment (25.1% in Q2 2021) and a proliferation of ever-shorter labour contracts which has a marked impact on inequality.

Since its implementation on 15 June, the so-called Iberian «gas cap» mechanism has brought about a major shift in the way the Spanish electricity system operates. In this article we analyse the effect it has had on electricity prices and some externalities it has introduced.

The NGEU funds and the national investment programmes in Germany and France are the result of a long process of changes in the big economic blocs, accelerated by COVID and the war in Ukraine. These efforts seek to redefine and adapt production models to the energy transition and digitalisation in a context of uncertainty and new geopolitical dynamics.

In recent years, European inflation has been stubbornly below the ECB’s desired rate, and since 2018 it has been slipping even further away. This weakness has intensified with the COVID-19 crisis. Will this weakness be temporary or permanent?

CaixaBank’s internal data allow us to assess in detail which groups are particularly suffering as a result of the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and to what extent public sector transfers are proving effective in protecting them.

After the experience of recent years, we know how political risk can alter the behaviour of key hypotheses in economic forecasting scenarios.

We outline the five assumptions that must be met in order for the factors that are holding back economic growth to dissipate and for the outlook with which the year has begun to be confirmed.

The Spanish economy continues to have the highest structural unemployment rate in the European Union, despite having managed to reduce it substantially in recent years. To curb it, improvements are needed on three fronts: greater supply and demand for employment and better matching between the two.

Although around 80% of Spanish exports to the United States are concentrated in five autonomous communities, no region is facing significant systemic risks. 

In October, the main stock market indices reached all-time highs, the dollar appreciated, sovereign debt yields declined and euro area peripheral spreads narrowed. Commodities exhibited disparity between the rise in metals and the decline in crude oil prices. The central banks fulfilled expectations: the Fed cut rates and the ECB kept them unchanged.

Between the end of September and the end of February, the US dollar depreciated by 6% in effective nominal terms and by 10% against the euro, trading at close to 1.07, a level not seen for almost a year. We explore what lies behind this change of trend and whether it is likely to continue.

Having launched the most intense monetary tightening cycle of recent decades, it appears that the central banks are on track to solve the unexpected upturn in inflation which the international economy has had to cope with since the first half of 2021.

Broadly speaking, there are three key factors which define the new macroeconomic picture of the Spanish economy that we have elaborated here at CaixaBank Research, and which are shared by most of the institutions that have updated their forecasts.