The last year has seen the biggest population growth in 14 years, but it is all due to immigration. Residents with Spanish nationality have fallen by 13,000 and those born in Spain by 101,000. Spain has experienced in the last year the highest population growth in the last 14 years, with nearly 600,000 more inhabitants at the end of this first quarter than at the same time in 2022. As…
Jakob Suwalski (Scope Ratings | France and Spain have enacted pension reforms this year to put their pension systems on a sounder financial footing and boost employment, but doubts remain about their long-term sustainability and impact on the economy, given their similar demographic trends. The content of the reforms is also different. France (AA/Stable) aims to rebalance its pension system by raising the statutory retirement age from 62 to 64…
According to the Bank of Spain (BdE), the debt of Spain’s public administrations as a whole increased by 1% in March compared to February, reaching a record high of €1.535 trillion, bringing it to 113% of GDP (113.2% at the end of 2022) – the BdE uses the nominal GDP of the last four quarters for this calculation. In the last 12 months, Spain’s public debt has grown by 5.6%…
Minister José Luis Escrivá’s recent pension reform will leave a public deficit of up to €22,000 million in the public coffers in 2023 alone, with its consequent negative effects on employment, growth and the competitiveness of the Spanish economy. This is what is stated in the latest report by the Institute of Economic Studies (IEE in its Spanish initials), which, under the title “La subida de las cotizaciones sociales (The…
José Luis Escrivá will go down in history as the minister whose trade unions called the first ever strike in the history of the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration. Staff shortages, delays in appointments and in the recognition of benefits, the closure of offices, and non-compliance with the agreements signed with the trade unions. For all these reasons, the trade unions CSIF and CC.OO. have called partial strikes…
On the left, Pedro Sánchez promises “93,000 affordable homes for young people and families” at a rally in Toledo on 21 April. On the right, at a rally in A Coruña, a week later, on 28 April, he was already promising 183,000 homes at affordable prices for… And with weeks of election campaigning left.
Fernando González Urbaneja| The government has not shied away from criticising employers for their labour management and for allegedly poor relations with unions and workers. They say that the beam in your own eye is less obvious than the speck in someone else’s. On labour relations, the government has little to boast of; its performance is abysmal, and the consequences for the customers of public services and for citizens are…
The Council of Ministers has given Vivendi, Prisa’s second-largest stakeholder with a 9.94% holding, permission to convert all of its convertible subordinated debentures, increasing its ownership position in the company’s capital. The total amount of the issue was €130 million and the first conversion period started on 1 May and will end on the tenth. Vivendi’s conversion of the subscribed bonds will result, in the final scenario of a full…
The Government has just signed a new bilateral agreement with the United States for the deployment of two new US Navy ships at the Rota Naval Base. This new agreement comes on the eve of Pedro Sánchez’s visit to the White House on Friday 12 May, where he will meet with President Joe Biden. It was the Minister of Defence, Margarita Robles, who signed the agreement together with the US…
Fernando González Urbaneja | Employers and unions have reached an income policy agreement on their own which is coherent with the previous ones signed during the last decades. There is no break in the social pact policy that accompanied Spanish democracy for decades. The agreement (a salary increase of 4% in 2023 and 3% in 2024) is indicative, a recommendation for decentralized collective bargaining, thousands of sector, province, company agreements……