As the Easter week holiday kicks off, the positive outlook for Spain’s tourism and hotel sector augurs yet another record-beating season. During this week, the occupancy rate in some tourism areas in Andalucia will be almost 100%, while on the islands nearly 90% occupancy is predicted.
Guy Hedgecoe | When it was announced last month that Basque terrorist group ETA was planning to disarm by April 8th, a couple of editors working for foreign media rang me to ask the same thing: How important is this? It was a fair question. There are two very different perspectives on the separatist organisation’s decision to give up its weapons via a team of international intermediaries in the south of France on Saturday.
J.L.M. Campuzano (Spanish Banking Association) | The Spanish economy’s financing capacity compared with the rest of the world stood at 8.943 billion euros in the fourth quarter, representing 3.1% of GDP. For the year as a whole, the financing capacity was 22.752 billion euros, 2% of GDP.
Investment in property assets in Spain rose 50% to 3.417 billion euros in the first quarter of 2017 from a year earlier, according to a report by CBRE. The retail segment (commercial centres and premises) was the most popular.
Spain’s services sector activity continued to grow strongly in March, marking 41 consecutive months of expansion. This led to the biggest increase in costs for six years and the largest rise in prices since July 2007, according to the PMI data elaborated by IHS Markit.
How solid a banking system is is such a cloudy issue that it’s difficult to make a valuation without doubts or ambiguities. For example, in Italy it’s vox populi that the banking sector is very weak, but what about in Spain?
Banco Popular has hugely damaged the reputation of the Spanish banking sector and its European counterpart after reformulating its 2016 accounts just two months after making them public. Investors are penalising the listed banks as the sector’s credibility is once again being questioned.
The latest figures have again confirmed what we have been seeing in the last few quarters: Spain is not only not losing industry at the moment, but in fact this is recovering very fast. In January, for example, Spanish industry’s revenues rose 13.1% from a year earlier, the biggest increase since April 2008.
Morocco has two powerful cards when it comes to dealing with the EU and particularly Spain: anti-terror cooperation and controlling migration. Sure enough, it appeared to start using the latter a few days after the Moroccan minister of agriculture, Aziz Akhannouch, wondered aloud why “Europe doesn’t want to work with us” in helping the country control its borders.
Fernando Rodríguez| Sovereign funds have invested 28.3 billion euros in Spanish companies in the period 2011-2016. Norway’s sovereign fund GPFG alone closed last year with a portfolio of over 12 billion euros in Spain, with shares in 75 companies and over 3.5 billion euros in government debt.