Spain is the country in the euro zone that has spent the least in terms of GDP to deal with the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is according to an article in the European Central Bank (ECB)’s economic bulletin, which was published today. The authors, Stephan Haroutunian, Steffen Osterloh and Kamila Slawinska, estimate Spain’s expenditure on this crisis at 1.3% of GDP, compared with 4% on average in the euro area. This is based on European Commission (EC) calculations.

José Salmerón (Intermoney) | Two years ago, the government agreed with the companies that own nuclear power plants for their phased closing. The first result of this on the Spanish electricity market will be the disappearance of a base power generation in all hours of the year and that in 2020 accounted for 23.6% of electricity demand. In addition, the energy sold at a price below the marginal cost of the market will be radically reduced and the price may rise as never seen before in the daily generation market.

Intermoney | ACS, through its US subsidiary Flatiron, will undertake the reconstruction of a runway at Dallas’ second airport, Love Field. The contract budget is 103 Mn€, and the works will comprise, amongst other projects, reshaping the concrete pavement and reforming the taxiway parallel to this runway. Love Field has an estimated annual passenger traffic of 17 million, not counting the pandemic effect, and serves as an operations hub for Southwest Airlines.

Amazon will charge from April all companies that sell their products in Spain, including more than 9,000 Spanish SMEs, the recently launched “Google tax.” This will be a burden for the big technology companies of 3% of their revenues from their digital services in the country. In other words, if a company sells a product for €100 through Amazon, and the reference price is 15%, the platform would apply 3% to that 15%, thus charging 0.45% more, i.e. 15.45%.

The Spanish economy fell by 11% in 2020 as a result of pandemic’s impact on activity, an unprecedented slump in peacetime. It is also the largest annual contraction since statistical data has been recorded, thus ending six consecutive years of growth, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE). The fall of the economy in 2020 is slightly below that forecast by the Government (11.2%).