After Italy and France, Germany did so in the second quarter of this year. The Spanish economy, according to the Bank of Spain, will not reach this point until 2024.
Italy and France had already achieved it. The average for the euro area achieved it by the end of 2021. And Germany did so after the second quarter of this year. Therefore, Spain has been completely left behind and is already the only European power that has not managed to recover the levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) prior to the pandemic.
The governor of the Bank of Spain himself, Pablo Hernández de Cos, confirmed this yesterday during his speech at the Faculty of Economics and Business Studies at the University of Malaga, in which he also stressed that “the recovery in Spain is still incomplete despite the relatively good performance in the second quarter”. He also added that “the most recent confidence indicators point to a loss of dynamism in activity”, and that “macroeconomic projections have been significantly revised downwards for growth and upwards for inflation”.
According to the BdE’s new forecasts, Spain will barely grow by 1.4% in 2023. And this will mean that it will not be until 2024 that the Spanish economy will be able to recover that pre-covid GDP level that the rest of the European powers have achieved.
And some forecasts, such as those of BBVA Research, even predict negative growth for Spain. “The economy could remain practically stagnant over the coming quarters, or even register moderate falls, as a result of the increase in uncertainty, the rise in inflation expectations and the increase in interest rates”.
