Search results
Los indicadores muestran que el ritmo de crecimiento del sector turístico español se está normalizando tras los excepcionales registros de 2022-2024, impulsados por la recuperación pospandemia y el consiguiente repunte del consumo de servicios. Las tendencias observadas a finales de 2024 se prolongan en 2025: el sector mantiene su atractivo para un creciente número de turistas internacionales, mientras que el turista residente pierde presencia en los destinos locales y gana protagonismo en el extranjero. Aun así, este año el sector volverá a ser clave para la economía española. Según nuestras previsiones, el PIB turístico crecerá un 2,7%, gracias al sólido arranque de año, al aumento de la renta disponible de las familias, a la reactivación de algunas economías europeas y a la moderación de la inflación turística.
The coronavirus pandemic took the world by surprise and brought international tourism almost to a complete halt. The initial phases of a relative recovery are restoring connectivity between those outbound markets and tourist destinations that have controlled the spread of the coronavirus. However, the sector will have to undertake a far-reaching and rapid transformation to adapt to the new, post-COVID-19 international tourist who will demand more personalised, flexible and, above all, safer services.
The pharmaceutical industry is a key and strategic sector for Spain’s economy, as was clearly demonstrated by the pandemic. In the past 25 years, the sector has become hugely significant and an important driver of Spanish exports and private R&D investment. Nevertheless, its production capacity still has room for improvement. The future of Spanish industry should be more closely linked to the pharmaceutical sector with a commitment to promote its growth, not only for strategic purposes but also for purely economic reasons, since it is an extremely competitive industry with a great capacity to generate good quality jobs that would help to modernise Spain’s economy.
The citrus fruit sector is one of the most important in the Spanish agrifood system and a leading player in international export markets. Its production structure is typically atomised, making it more difficult to modernise the farms, and the sector has some important challenges to tackle. In particular, strong competition from non-EU countries at a time when production costs are rising sharply, accentuated by a prolonged drought and the war in Ukraine. In any case, the figures suggest that Spain’s citrus production continues to be the most competitive in the world, thanks to its hard-won reputation as a product of the highest quality produced under the strictest health standards.
2020 will go down in history as the year of COVID but it will also be remembered that, faced by a very difficult situation, the response provided by the food chain was extraordinary, guaranteeing an uninterrupted supply to all Spanish households. A year and a half later, the primary sector still looks remarkably dynamic, although the exceptional growth rates posted during the most critical months of the pandemic have now been left behind.
Air passenger transport is one of the mainstays of the tourism sector's value chain. For this reason, and in a similar way to the rest of the sector, it experienced a huge slump in 2020 in the wake of COVID-19. Airlines are currently having to tackle a combination of high capital costs due to their large structures and an almost total lack of operating income. The evident need for liquidity among Europe's airlines has led some governments to inject public capital to prevent their collapse. However, 2021 looks like being the watershed the tourism sector needs: the progress made by the vaccination roll-outs and the approval of measures such as the health passport will be crucial for air passenger transport to embark on the road to recovery and return to being one of the mainstays of tourism.
The Spanish residential market has suffered from a slump in foreign demand during the pandemic. Restrictions on international travel have hit the most tourist-oriented areas of the Mediterranean coast and islands particularly hard, which have seen a sharp fall in purchases by foreigners. Nevertheless, although house prices in these tourist-oriented municipalities have seen a marked slowdown, the adjustment was very moderate until Q1 2021 and the outlook for the coming quarters is good, thanks to the revival of international tourism, especially in the coming year.
Foreign demand has been one of the factors supporting Spain's real estate sector throughout its recovery. House purchases by foreigners have tripled in just 10 years, reaching the substantial figure of 65,300 homes in 2018, 12.6% of the total. This article looks at the foreign demand for housing in Spain as well as factors that will affect the trend over the coming quarters.
Analyzing of consumption growth since May 2021, when the last state of emergency ended, we can see that the recovery in spending on transport, and especially on leisure, hospitality and tourism, was particularly strong. The sectors hardest hit by the restrictions (most of them still in force in Q1 2021) are therefore the ones that are recovering the most. On the other hand, consumer durables (furniture, textiles, etc.) have benefitted much more modestly from the pick-up in consumption, as will be seen below, while spending on basic necessities has fallen (except among low-income households), partly because these goods can be replaced by the services offered by the hospitality industry.
The war in Ukraine has fuelled fears of shortages of certain essential inputs for the agrifood sector, as Russia and Ukraine are major players in the global supply of cereals, oils and fertilisers, among other commodities. It is therefore not surprising that, following the outbreak of the conflict, the prices of agricultural commodities rose sharply on international markets. This price hike has been passed on to the production costs of Spain’s agricultural sector, a net importer of fertilisers and animal feed, and is also having an impact on the food prices paid by end consumers. Nevertheless, the most recent developments (agreements to release part of the grain retained in the Black Sea and good harvests in other producing countries) have helped to stabilise agricultural prices and reduce the risk of a global food crisis.
This winter’s drought has highlighted one of the most important challenges facing Spain’s agrifood sector: improving how water resources are used given the prospect of their availability becoming more limited.
The food price rally has begun to slow, but the cumulative increase since 2019 is significant and expenditure on food now represents a higher percentage of Spanish households’ consumption. The decline in agricultural and energy commodity prices in the international markets relative to their peaks reached in 2022 should help to contain agricultural production costs and thus to further ease the inflationary pressures on food over the coming quarters.
The agrifood sector continues to suffer from the sharp rise in production costs and the impact of the drought. However, the decline in agricultural commodity and energy prices on international markets from the peaks reached in 2022 should help contain agricultural production costs and thereby moderate inflationary pressures on food. Nevertheless, the severe drought that has been affecting the Iberian Peninsula since last year has reduced the yields of a large number of crops such as cereals and fruits, impacting both prices (up) and the volume of exports (down). All in all, in value terms agrifood exports continued to grow at a good rate in S1 2023 due to the rise in prices, reflecting the high competitiveness of Spain’s agrifood sector despite the adverse conditions.