With the summer season over, the fall in traffic at Spanish airports has increased. In September traffic contracted by 79.9% to 5.46 million passengers compared to August – the accumulated drop for the year is -69.7%. However, Aena is trying to open up other growth channels through international expansion. To this end, it has announced it will bid for an airport in Indonesia.
Pedro A. Muñoz | PharmaMar has just announced positive results for its APLICOV trial with Aplidin against COVID-19. This antiviral achieves the primary safety objective and the secondary efficacy goal, as well as a significant reduction in viral load and C-reactive protein (CRP) in hospitalized patients. A few days before this news, the company’s president, José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, gave an interview to The Corner.
The Government is forecasting a 0.9% revaluation in public pensions in 2021, following the increase already applied this year. This would allow for ensuring pensioners’ purchasing power, as it is included in the 2021 Budget Plan which the Executive sent last Thursday to Brussels.
Spain’s CAF is amongst the investors interested in buying the only factory Alstom has put up for sale in France to meet the conditions imposed by the European Commission on the purchase of the Canadian firm Bombardier. In fact, CAF is the favourite to take over Alstom’s assets. The French unions have positioned themselves in favour of CAF due to the size of the company and their commitment to retaining the entire workforce. That said, CAF will have to compete with Skoda for the factory.
According to a Schroders’ Global Investment Study 2020, which surveyed 23,000 investors in 32 locations around the world, interest in sustainable investment products has increased globally. Up to 47% of global investors acknowledge that they invest in sustainable products, compared to 42% two years ago. This upward trend has also been seen in Spain, where 45% of those surveyed were encouraged to invest sustainably, an increase of 7% compared to the results for 2018 (38%).
In 2019, 50% of the imports and 47% of the exports were traded with the EU27, which makes the EU27 market the UK’s largest trading partner. In 2006, both, the shares of UK exports and imports to the EU27, were at the maximum level; since then both shares are on a general downward trend, the exports more than the imports. Since the referendum in 2016, the exposure to the EU27 market did not significantly change from the perspective of the UK. Hence, especially as a supplier, the EU27 matter for the UK. For the EU27, the UK is much less important as a trading partner: in 2019, only 4% of total exports go to the UK and 6% of the total imports are from the UK, respectively. While the trade shares decrease between 2001 and 2007, they remain relatively stable thereafter. Since the referendum in 2016, we have seen a slight decrease in the trade shares with the UK.
Indicators for the real estate market show a significant recovery in activity in the sector, following the standstill during the state of alarm. On the demand side, home sales recovered well in July and increased by 20% month-on-month, although in cumulative terms for the year to date there is still a year-on-year decline of 25.8%. On the supply side, the construction sector has also quickly restarted its activity. In August, cement consumption was only 2.1% below the level of August last year, with a notable recovery from the 50% fall registered in April.
William Horncastle via The Conversation | The amount of money spent on US elections eclipses the annual total economic output of some small countries. The total spending by candidates, political parties and independent campaign groups in the 2016 race was US$6.5 billion – comparable to the GDP that year of Monaco, Kosovo or Liechtenstein. The 2020 election cycle is forecast to smash previous spending records, with the Center for Responsive Politics estimating it will cost US$11 billion. That would be comparable to the 2019 GDP of Equatorial Guinea or Chad.
Covid-19’s first victim continues to recover, with structural measures increasing the economy’s robustness and boosting its currency. That is not without risks, however. Lately, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has been valiantly trying to slow down the appreciation of its currency, the renminbi, vs. the U.S. dollar. In part by trying to encourage capital outflows. “That will not be easy,” argues Elke Speidel-Walz, our Chief Economist for Emerging Markets.
The world public deficit in 2020 stands at 12.7% of GDP, compared to its forecast of 3.9% in April, and gross public debt could increase to 100% of global GDP, says the IMF. Thus, it supports more spending and outlines scenarios in which some countries will be able to stabilize their debt, by the middle of this decade, without tax increases or budget cuts. Specifically, its estimates suggest that a public infrastructure investment of 1% of GDP could boost production by 2.7%, creating between 20 and 33 M jobs.