MADRID | The Spanish government claims the 2012 budget to be the toughest ever. On face value it embodies a 2.5% GDP deficit reduction, an awesome effort by any standard. Slashing expenditure amounts to two thirds of the squeeze, the rest falling on tax adjustments. Will budgetary crunch depress activity or axe main spending policies? A closer look dispels any anxiety over these daunting effects. Many of the cuts come…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | In this post of economistsview, by Economics professor Mark Thoma, there is a number of charts of several countries and their evolution post-financial crisis. The aim is to probe whether such crises leave temporary or permanent effects. Here I select the one about Spain, where we can see its GDP. In mid-1973, the first oil crisis came in and Spain’s GDP sort of missed its natural path, which never regained. Well, this is old news, many would say: during the…
For Spain’s Inditex, weathering the crisis isn’t near enough: the company seems ready for a full combat. Inditex board will submit a proposal to the annual general meeting of shareholders in July for payment of a dividend of €1.80 per share, an increase year on year of 12.5pc. This dividend will consist of a €0.9 per share interim dividend payable on 2 May 2012 and a €0.90 per share final…
LONDON | Investment house Schroders brings in its latest ‘Economic and Strategy Viewpoint‘ the final word about austerity versus money printing. It is a conciliatory one. Well, sort of: chief economist Keith Wade and Europe economist Azad Zangana set the record seamless and believe each team is right, at least, about the other team: they all are wrong. On one hand, Wade and Zangana say they hold the “belief that…
“We have a plan to combine fiscal consolidation with structural reforms in order to jumpstart growth in the country and help stabilize the euro area.” This was the core message of the Spanish minister of Economy and Competiveness Luis de Guindos’ speech on Friday at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington-based think tank. In his first official trip to the US, De Guindos also held a meeting with the most…
The letter that the heads of government of twelve EU countries, including Spain’s Mariano Rajoy, sent to Brussels presented an eight point programme to promote economic growth in the European Union. It was addressed to the president of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy and that of the Commission, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, yet was not signed by either Germany or France, the two main economies of the euro zone…
LONDON | The London-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research on Friday put its baseline forecast for global growth on 3.5% for 2012. The NIESR gave next year a slightly higher growth rate probability of 4%. In both cases, the Institute assumes a downward revision of about 0.5 percentage point in each year compared to its last forecast. The NIESR warned that the financial instability resulting from the euro crisis, combined…
