Wednesday’s graph: the pain of Spanish SMEs spells pain in France, Germany

Although the difficulties that the Spanish small and medium sized companies experience to access finance showed signs of very soft relief, the figures were bad. The latest survey on SMEs in the euro zone offered a stark picture of small companies in Spain suffering the worse end of the credit crunch, as a consequence of a weak domestic market.

In contrast, Spain’s corporations are able to weather the crisis thanks to the volume of sales generated abroad, even if this margin has been decreasing, too. Of course, the reading of this chart affects the euro zone as a whole beyond the Spanish frontiers: experts at Afi said that

“The fall in external activity of the Spanish economy is a correlation of the lack of traction in the economic cycle of Germany and France, Spain’s main trade partners.”