The UK announced on Monday that it will cut its business energy subsidies by 85%, deeming the current subsidy package “unsustainably expensive”. The current subsidy package ends in March 2023 and costs £18.4 billion. It will then abandon caps of £75 per MWh for gas and £211 per MWh for electricity and give a discount of £6.97 per MWh for gas and £19.61 per MWh for electricity from April 2023…
The Instituto de Estudios Económicos (IEE) pointed out on Tuesday that the tax burden in Spain had reached historic highs in 2022, exceeding 42% of GDP and standing above the EU average (41.7%) for 2021 – the last year for which data are available. “The tax effort, i.e. the tax burden normalised according to income, is already 53% higher than the EU average”, warned the IEE President, Íñigo Fernández de…
F. Rodriguez| Only 16 funds out of a sample of three thousand European collective investment vehicles -known as UCITs (Undertakings for the Collective Investment in Transferable Securities), which globally manage one trillion euros, meet at least three of the criteria of the EU’s European standard for European products and services – EU Ecolabel – according to an analysis of managers’ portfolios and proxy data published by ESMA, the EU’s capital…
Eurostat has released employment data for Europe, and among the EU-27, the highest unemployment rates were in Spain (12.4%), Greece (11.4%) and Italy (7.8%). In contrast, the lowest unemployment figures were observed in the Czech Republic (2.7%), Poland and Germany (3% each). The European indicator remains at an all-time low of 6.5%, while Spain doubles the rate and is the country with the highest unemployment, with a rate of 12.4%….
Norbolsa | According to a panel of experts in the sector, in 2023 it is expected that, house prices will advance, albeit timidly, by around 0.5%, compared to last year’s 6%. Sales, meanwhile, after an impressive 2022 (650,000 operations, levels not seen since 2007), will fall by 14%, to 557,000. The housing market has to face higher interest rates, economic slowdown, higher construction costs and a weaker labour market, but…
Alphavalue /Divacons | The current political instability in Brazil could harm Spanish companies with an interest in the country. The police have regained control of Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court after the violent invasion carried out by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro. However, and despite the fact that Bolsonaro has distanced himself from the actions of the protestors, the political tension continues. Among the Spanish companies most exposed…
Spaniards are falling behind the standard of living of the rest of the European economies: they have lost the most wealth per person – €1,700- since 2019, according to data available until 2021, and already occupy the 18th place in the continental standard of living ranking. If in 2018 Spain stood at 91.2% of the EU average gross national income per capita, by in 2021 this had dropped to 83.4%,…
In 2019, the number of retail businesses in Spain was around 460,000. By 2021, that figure had fallen to less than 428,000 businesses. In other words, some 32,000 businesses had fallen by the wayside, a figure that increased by a further 13,000 retail businesses lost in 2022, meaning that some 45,000 businesses would have been lost since the year before the pandemic, according to UPTA data. The rise of e-commerce,…
Bankinter| Telefónica will close 5,800 exchanges that serve landlines and broadband via ADSL between 2023 and 2024, and will replace them with fibre optic exchanges. After the process, Telefónica (TEF) will have ~3,000 fibre-optic exchanges that will replace the ~8,000 that made up the copper network. Opinion of Bankinter’s analysis team: The programme, although planned, accelerates the cost savings and efficiency gains of running a single, more robust fibre network….
Bankinter| From the minutes of the Fed’s meeting of December 13th and 14th: There was no explicit mention of the possibility of an interest rate cut in 2023; rather they argue that they believe it is appropriate to keep interest rates at elevated levels for an extended period of time, although they retain the flexibility to react as appropriate to the data at any given time. The Committee expresses concern…