Caixabank (Eduard LLorens and Alex Ruiz )  | Intuition tells us that a shock like COVID-19 should increase country risk and this has certainly been confirmed by the data. Nevertheless, a longer-lasting impact on country risk should be observed, which is not the case. The investor narrative would be that in the states hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, NGEU and the ECB have had a greater mitigating effect: as much as four credit rating levels in the cases of Spain and France, and three in the case of Portugal. 

The price of electricity in Spain has increased significantly in January coinciding with the Filomena storm -which last week caused the heaviest snowfall in more than 60 years- and the subsequent cold wave, with extreme temperatures for Spain of -10º. This “perfect storm” will boost energy consumption by at least 30% this week and could mean up to 200 additional euros for consumers’ pockets. The point is that the electricity bill has increased by up to 92% in Spain in the last 15 years and if this trend at the start of the year continues, it could rise by a further 21%.

New machinery is one of the main tools for introducing R&D contributions to the productive processes. In Spain, for every company working with obsolete machinery there are 45 companies improving their production capacity. The phenomenon also occurs in the improvement of production facilities, although it is less intense. Seven percent of companies have recently modernized their workspace, compared to 0.4% operating in areas in poor condition, according to data from nearly 250,000 interviews carried out by Iberinform in 2020.