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The coronavirus outbreak has made remote work popular and fuelled debate regarding its impact on society and our way of life. However, the concept of working from home is not new; in fact, it was the norm for a large number of workers until well into the 19th century.

But for once, to start the year on a good footing, permit me to dare to highlight what is going well, and the things that can go even better, of which there are plenty.

The Portuguese banking system faces the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis with a more resilient position and greater room for manoeuvre in dealing with stress situations.

The saving capacity of households is being reduced due to the rise in inflation. Nevertheless, the level of savings in 2021 was still high.

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.

While economists have been incorporating big data into their analyses for a number of years now, the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a veritable revolution in real-time economics. The latest contribution from the CaixaBank Research team to this revolution is the Real-time economics portal, launched on 8 November 2022.

The labour share is a variable with important economic, political and social implications which is of particular interest to analyse in turbulent times like the present.

Where will inflation in advanced economies lie when the cycle that began with COVID-19, and which has continued with the war in Ukraine, comes to an end and what will happen with inflation targets?

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?

Meeting climate targets depends heavily on public and private investment and their effects on the development of new technologies. Therefore, much of the economic momentum since COVID has focused on encouraging this ecological transition. In this article, we explore how the US government and, above all, the European Union and its Member States are incentivising it.

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.

On the eve of Black Friday, we analyse online consumption in Spain by sector and age group using anonymised internal CaixaBank data.

The COVID-19 crisis would have led to a sharp increase in inequality if the actions taken by the public sector had not cushioned it to some extent. The high levels of inequality recorded during the peak of the crisis are gradually decreasing thanks to the recovery in business. 

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, American households have been much more pessimistic than one would expect given the current state of the US economy. Why is this? Is the same thing happening in Europe?