04 February, 2016

By VIVA Team

The Bank of Spain is the central national bank and the supervisor of the spanish bank system. On the first half of 2012 it has endured a lot of criticism for its possible responsibility in the banking crisis, specially because of the Bankia cases. This building, one of the official Bank of Spain headquarters, is located at plaza de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain.

The Bank of Spain has welcomed the latest data, not least because recovery has been driven largely by domestic consumption.

Amid concerns that a new global economic crisis could be in the offing later this year, Spain’s economic performance in 2015 offered plenty of encouragement.

As predicted by many leading economists towards the end of last year, the Spanish economy grew by 3.2% in 2015 – putting the country towards the leading pack of strengthening European economies…

The data, published late last week by the National Statistics Institute (INE), confirms that the Spanish economy grew in 2015 at its fastest rate since 2007, which as any follower of Spain’s fortunes knows was immediately before the last global economic crisis.

Despite the warnings, few believe that any impending downturn on a world scale will be anything as severe as that witnessed in 2008, and the signs are positive that even should recession start to bite elsewhere, Spain is likely to be immune from the pain.

The fourth and final quarter of 2015 saw the economy grow a further 0.8% on the quarter that preceded it, and was a solid 3.5% up on the fourth quarter of 2014.

The Bank of Spain has remarked that strong levels of private consumption and business investments – both spurred by a return to confidence in the job market – had driven this economic upturn, while exports, which delivered encouraging figures during the depths of the recession, had little to do with this latest growth.

That last point is very important for many reasons, not least because it means that household spending within Spain is now much stronger, which in turn has a positive effect on business spending and the performance of many of the country’s most important industries, including the property market.

Further encouraging data on the health of Spain’s economy came via the EPA (Encuesta de Población Activa) poll last week, which revealed that there were 525,100 new jobs created across Spain throughout the whole of 2015, helping to bring unemployment down to 20.9% – its lowest level in five years.