What the INE statistics reveal is that all this growth comes from a population born outside Spain that now resides in our country. This group grew last year by 571,000 people, compensating for the loss of the population born in Spain. The population born and residing in Spain suffered a drop of 63,500 people in 2023. This means that births in our country did not compensate for deaths. However, the number of inhabitants grew by more than half a million people for the second year in a row.
Already in 2022 there was a similar growth, with one million more people in our country in just two years, which in turn supports the rise in employment and GDP. “A very important part of the growth of the economy in recent years has been due to the increase in population, without significant improvements in productivity,” remarked the Bank of Spain in one of its latest presentations, according to the digital newspaper Vozpopuli.
In the last eight years the population in Spain has grown by more than two million people, from 46.5 million people in January 2017 to 48.6 million in January 2024, and all of them were born in another country. A total of 8.77 million foreign-born people reside in Spain, of whom 2.28 million have Spanish nationality.
