Fernando González Urbaneja | There is an abundance of modern, current literature on how democracies die; it is a subject that interests academics who theorise on the subject and retired politicians who use their heads to think and review what they have experienced and suffered. In almost all these works there are two indicators that do not fail. Firstly the practice of destroying adversaries turned enemies, and secondly the discrediting…
Up to six European countries have already announced that they will abandon the Digital Services Tax (DST) (known as the Google tax) after its failure to raise revenue. They have expressed their intention to eliminate this tax and transfer their tax policy to the new international project, led by the US, on which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is already working. These countries will wait for the OECD’s new tax rules to be approved before eliminating their Google taxes.
Spain is the third country in Europe and first in the European Union in terms of the number of free wifi hotspots on its streets, according to a study by VpnMentor, the world’s largest VPN review website. Spain has 93,225 free wifi hotspots, placing it behind only Russia and Ukraine.
Alphavalue | Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that the country will earmark 20% of its special drawing rights to the trust funds for vulnerable countries. The special drawing rights (SDR) are an international reserve asset, created by the International Money Fund in 1969 to supplement its member countries’ official reserves. Specifically, Sánchez has said that a minimum of 350 million euros will be destined for boosting the capital…
Fernando González Urbaneja | Pedro Sánchez has promised in some ad hoc forums to repeal the labour reform, although in other forums he has argued the opposite in order to point to a revision of the Workers’ Statute taking into account the new labour frameworks of the 21st century.
The Ministry of Health has notified on Monday that 90% of the target population, i.e. those covered by the vaccination campaign, have already received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. In total there are 37,891,519 people, almost 80% of the total population of Spain. With regard to the current average incidence of infection in Spain in the last 14 days, the slight rise recorded in recent days has been slowed down, with the figure falling to 41.90 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
At the end of the first half of 2021, world GDP had already recovered end-2019 levels – after a decline of 3.5% in 2020 – thanks to the strong growth of the Chinese and US economies, according to calculations made in May by the OECD. Analysts at Oxford Economics agree in their calculations, which also talk about a GDP of 100.1% of 2019 in June 2021 and of a global…
Repsol will stop producing oil in mid-June at ‘Casablanca’, the last oil platform in Spain located in the waters around the coast of Tarragona. The new Spanish Climate Change and Energy Transition Law contemplates that Spain will no longer grant new exploration authorisations, so this shutdown of Casablanca is a step towards this purpose. In 2018, the hydrocarbon field of La Lora in Burgos, the oldest oil field in Spain operating since 1964, was already forced to close.
BancaMarch | Brussels has upgraded Spain’s GDP growth forecast. The Commission’s new forecasts put Spain’s GDP growth at 5.9% in 2021 (5.6% previous estimate) and 6.8% in 2022 (5.3% previous estimate). So Spain would regain pre-pandemic GDP levels by end-next year. The improvement in the revision is a consequence of progress in vaccination and the disbursement of European funds, of which Spain is one of the major beneficiaries. To this…
Pep Ruiz (BBVA Research) | The US economy’s stimulus plan, with a fiscal stimulus that can exceed 12 pp of US GDP, which could increase Spain’s GDP by 0.2 pp and 0.9 pp this year and next year respectively.