Luis Alcaide (Capital Madrid) | The current account balance of payments recorded a surplus of 8.428 billion euros in 2021, when exports grew by 21% and imports by 24%, with China as the leading supplier (11.9% of our imports vs. 9.6% for Germany and 9.1% for France). In the face of the avalanche of unquieting news, Spain’s political and economic health in the first months of this year 2022 and…
Luis Alcaide | Early morning of 26 February 2022. Invasion of Russian troops. I don’t know whether I’m in Madrid or in the Bucharest of that morning on 21 August 1968. At that time, 170,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers were invading Czechoslovakia, and the Prague Spring was a political and economic threat to the communist bloc. Czechoslovakia, which was a developed pre-World War II society and economy, offered in 1968 economic…
Luis Alcaide | In most European states the wealth tax has been abolished. Only France has kept it for the taxpayer, but without physically suffocating the taxpayer. Another thing is the municipal taxes on property tenure, which exist almost everywhere in the world. The latter are key to local budgets, based on the occupation of a municipal space and in return for the services of police and real estate surveillance,…
Luis Alcaide | The evolution of Spain’s export trade confirms the viability of the economy, whose rhythm is being maintained thanks to its strong export sector. Political labyrinths aside, according to the latest available data for the month of November, the increase in sales of Spanish goods to foreign markets exceeds the average increase in the EU, as well as that of the main European competitors. The number of exporters…
Luis Alcaide | In the Romanised Spain of the first two centuries, the so-called Silver Age, an Aragonese, Quintilian, whom his countryman Martial would call “summus mo¬de¬rator juven¬tae”, called for “men of talent, capable of living in a cordial world and participating in public affairs”. Centuries later, in a Spain that was already moving towards modernity, the poet of the upper classes, Campoamor, described those men of talent as “a…
Luis Alcaide | A British parliamentary spokesman and former development minister, Andrew Mitchell, has declared it in no uncertain terms: “The UK is losing its reputation as a credible jurisdiction. Our (British) companies have become vehicles for the laundering of money. The vulgarity of the internal market, the weakness of regulations and the pathetic response to organised crime are being used to facilitate all kinds of misdemeanours. Many EU Europeans…
Luis Alcaide | Angela Merkel’s departure from the German chancellery raises the question of the attitude of the Symaphoric coalition (Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals) towards the European integration process. In the meantime, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and French President Emmanuel Macron signed an extensive bilateral agreement in Rome (60 pages, including both foreign policy and defence policy and a series of concrete economic agreements). This strengthens the role…
In September 2021, Spanish exports grew by 21.9% year-on-year to 28.337 billion euros, a record for the last decade. The figure exceeds by 5 billion euros the peak in sales to the rest of the world recorded in September 2019. In turn, imports also show the highest figure since 2012, with a year-on-year increase of 24.2% to 30.730 billion euros. An increase that is not unrelated to the price of…
Luis Alcaide | In Rome, at the G20 meeting, the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi was confident about the success of the conference: “We put coal behind us”. Nothing of the sort. The headlines in the previous editions of the Hungarian press on 1 November read: “Scarce coal restrictions leave a big gap”. A big difference. The leaders of the 20 major economies of the planet have agreed to “halt…
Luis Alcaide | Spanish exports of goods recorded a historic rise of 71.8 % in April to 25.841 billion euros, and imports rose by 63.9 % to 27.138 billion, compared to April 2020, which was marked by the restrictions of the pandemic. n the cumulative January-April period, Spanish exports recorded a rise of 16.9%, (a growth exceeding that of Germany with 11%, and France with 9.6%) totalling 98.149 billion euros, and imports of 10.3%, with 102.709 billion. This leaves in a trade deficit of 4.560 billion euros, 50.3% lower than a year earlier.