Spain

The International Energy Agency (IEA) regularly conducts in-depth peer reviews of the energy policies of its member countries. This process supports energy policy development and encourages the exchange of international best practices and experiences.

Since the last IEA review in 2015, Spain has solved a long-standing issue of tariff deficits in its electricity and gas sectors and closed all of its coal mines, which has allowed it to place the energy transition at the forefront of its energy and climate change policies.

The current Spanish framework for energy and climate is based on the 2050 objectives of national climate neutrality, 100% renewable energy in the electricity mix, and 97% renewable energy in the total energy mix. As such, it is centred on the massive development of renewable energy, energy efficiency, electrification and renewable hydrogen.

Notwithstanding its considerable progress to date on decarbonising and increasing the share of renewables in the electricity sector, Spain’s total energy mix is still heavily dominated by fossil fuels. Notably, the transport, industry and buildings sectors all have considerable work ahead of them to meet the country’s targets for decarbonisation and higher shares of renewables.

When all of Spain’s plans and strategies are implemented, a completely different energy sector will emerge in which fossil fuels are no longer dominant and end-user sectors are mostly electrified. Such a transformed energy landscape will come with new challenges and will provide new opportunities.

In this report, the IEA provides energy policy recommendations to help Spain effectively manage this transformation of its energy sector.

The increased adoption of digital technologies has been transforming the Spanish economy. The COVID-19 crisis is expected to speed up this process. The new digital strategy, ‘Digital Spain 2025’, features a number of ambitious objectives in a timely manner. There is a need to promote digital diffusion across the country by developing communication infrastructure further, while addressing the digital divide across regions and ensuring digital security. Addressing key bottlenecks, such as people’s skills, through education policies at every level, would enable the use of digital technologies and boost productivity growth. This would help in particular laggard firms and low-skilled people, making the benefits of digitalisation shared by all. In parallel, R&D should be enhanced to lift the capacity of firms to adopt and use digital technologies effectively, resulting in improving their business models and products. Finally, business dynamism should be revitalised to encourage risk taking among firms, thus facilitating digital diffusion, while ensuring an efficient allocation of capital.

The Spanish economy entered a deep recession in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A strong government response has protected jobs and firms. However, the crisis has exacerbated long-standing structural challenges, such as high unemployment, inequalities and regional disparities. The national recovery plan will help the near-term recovery and should also be used to promote long-term growth potential. A durable and inclusive recovery will require improving the quality of jobs via lower labour market segmentation, better skills and enhanced support for job seekers. Reforms to secure the pension system’s sustainability will be key to address medium-term fiscal challenges. Spain is improving on digitalisation, but there is room to improve the uptake and use of digital technologies to boost productivity growth.Enhancing digital diffusion requires addressing remaining gaps in digital infrastructure and enhancing capabilities of firms and people to take full advantage of digitalisation via higher investment in innovation and skills.

SPECIAL FEATURE: ENHANCING DIGITAL DIFFUSION FOR HIGHER PRODUCTIVITY

Questo rapporto analizza la dimensione territoriale della produttività nelle cooperative italiane, segmento che esprime una quota relativamente ampia dell’occupazione nazionale. Le cooperative assolvono a un’importante funzione anticiclica nella creazione di occupazione durante le crisi. Dopo la pandemia, potrebbero contribuire in misura significativa a un riorientamento dell’economia verso modelli maggiormente improntati all’inclusività e allo sviluppo sostenibile. In futuro, un rafforzamento dei livelli di produttività potrebbe favorire le cooperative nel perseguimento delle loro finalità di natura economica e sociale. Nell’analizzare la produttività nelle cooperative italiane, questo rapporto adotta un approccio incentrato sulla dimensione territoriale, date le loro numerose interdipendenze con le comunità locali. Le evidenze emerse mettono in luce i fattori locali maggiormente correlati alla prevalenza e alla produttività delle cooperative tra le regioni, i settori economici e nelle diverse classi dimensionali d’impresa. Un confronto con le imprese italiane non cooperative, così come con le imprese spagnole, cooperative e non, consente di osservare come i livelli di produttività varino a livello territoriale e tra diversi tipi di imprese osservati. Questo rapporto utilizza l’approccio analitico sviluppato dallo Spatial Productivity Lab dell’OCSE.

This report explores the spatial dimension of productivity in the co-operatives of Italy, a country where they make up a relatively large share of total national employment. Co-operatives play a countercyclical role in job creation during crises. In a post-pandemic world, they could make a major contribution to steering the economy towards inclusiveness and sustainability. Productivity growth ensures that co-operatives can achieve both economic and social goals in the future. This report applies a place-based approach to investigate the issue of productivity in co-operatives, given their many interdependencies with local communities. Novel evidence points to the local factors that are linked with the concentration and productivity of co-operatives across regions, sectors and firm size classes in Italy. A comparison with other Italian firms as well as with Spanish co-operatives and other Spanish firms serves to illustrate how productivity performance varies across space and firm types. This report constitutes an empirical test for the analytical approach developed by the OECD Spatial Productivity Lab.

Cette base de données annuelles couvre un large éventail de statistiques sur le commerce international des pays de l'OCDE. Elle constitue une source fiable de données en valeur par produit et par pays partenaire. Chacun des trois premiers volumes des Statistiques du commerce international par produit présente les statistiques relatives à six pays, celles-ci étant publiées dès réception des données. Les quatrième et cinquième présentent sept pays et le sixième volume porte sur cinq pays ainsi que les deux groupements de pays de l'OCDE ; OCDE Total et UE28-Extra.

Pour chaque pays sont présentés des tableaux se référant aux sections et divisions de la classification Système Harmonisé SH 2012 (une et deux positions). Chaque tableau permet de visualiser à la fois les importations et les exportations des cinq années les plus récentes par produit pour plus de soixante-dix pays partenaires ou groupes de pays partenaires.

This reliable source of yearly data covers a wide range of statistics on international trade of OECD countries and provides detailed data in value by commodity and by partner country. The first three volumes of International Trade by Commodity Statistics each contain the tables for six countries, published in the order in which they become available. The fourth and fifth contain seven countries and the sixth volume includes five countries as well as the OECD country groupings OECD Total and EU28-Extra.

For each country, this publication shows detailed tables relating to the Harmonised System HS 2012 classification, Sections and Divisions (one- and two- digit). Each table presents imports and exports of a given commodity with more than seventy partner countries or country groupings for the most recent five-year period available.

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the standard measure of the value of final goods and services produced by a country during a period minus the value of imports. This subset of Aggregate National Accounts comprises comprehensive statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) by presenting the three different approaches of its measure of GDP: output based GDP, expenditure based GDP and income based GDP. These three different measures of gross domestic product (GDP) are further detailed by transactions whereby: the output approach includes gross value added at basic prices, taxes less subsidies, statistical discrepancy; the expenditure approach includes domestic demand, gross capital formation, external balance of goods and services; and the income approach includes variables such as compensation of employees, gross operating surplus, taxes and production and imports. Gross domestic product (GDP) data are measured in national currency and are available in current prices, constant prices and per capita starting from 1950 onwards.

This dataset contains tax revenue collected by Spain. It provides detailed tax revenues by sector (Supranational, Federal or Central Government, State or Lander Government, Local Government, and Social Security Funds) and by specific tax, such as capital gains, profits and income, property, sales, etc.

Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of income support is a key input into an evidence-based policy process. This paper proposes a novel empirical method for monitoring the accessibility and levels of safety net benefits. It focusses on minimum-income benefits (MIB) and other non-contributory transfers and relies on data on the amounts of cash support that individuals in need receive in practice. Results show that accessibility and benefit levels differ enormously across countries – for instance, in 2015/16, more than four out of five low-income workless one-person households received MIB in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, compared to only one in five in Greece, Italy and Korea, three countries that have since sought to strengthen aspects of safety-net provisions.

Overcoming administrative fragmentation to build an integrated public transport network is one of the main actions taken in the Madrid Region to improve mobility. The lack of a regional development plan and the poor linkages between transport and urban development policies are, however, the main obstacles to fostering accessibility. The paper argues that a regional development plan and spatial planning to underpin transport investment decisions are needed to make the most of transport infrastructure and foster growth, well-being and effective environmental policies. This paper aims to reveal policy lessons from the experience of the Madrid Region in fostering urban mobility and accessibility, which could inspire policy change in other EU cities.

This country policy profile on education in Spain is part of the Education Policy Outlook series. Building on the first country policy profile for Spain (2014), it offers a concise analysis of where the education system stands today in terms of strengths, challenges and ongoing policy efforts, and how this compares to other systems. The profile brings together over a decade's worth of policy analysis by the Education Policy Outlook, as well as the latest OECD data, relevant thematic and country-specific work and other international and national evidence.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on SME access to finance. In particular, the sudden drop in revenues created acute liquidity shortages, threatening the survival of many viable businesses. The report documents an increase in demand for bank lending in the first half of 2020, and a steady supply of credit thanks to government interventions. On the other hand, other sources of finance declined, in particular early-stage equity.

This paper, a special edition of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs, focuses on the impacts of COVID-19 on SME access to finance, along with government policy responses. It reveals that the pre-crisis financing environment was broadly favourable for SMEs and entrepreneurs, who benefited from low interest rates, loose credit standards and an increasingly diverse offer of financing instruments.

It documents the unprecedented scope and scale of the policy responses undertaken by governments world-wide, and details their key characteristics, and outlines the principal issues and policy challenges for the next phases of the pandemic, such as the over-indebtedness of SMEs and the need to continue to foster a diverse range of financing instruments for SMEs.

Ce rapport est une édition spéciale du Tableau de bord de l’OCDE sur le financement des PME et des entrepreneurs, publication phare de l’OCDE. Il examine en détail les conséquences du COVID-19 sur l’accès des PME au financement, ainsi que les mesures prises en conséquence par les pouvoirs publics. Il apparaît qu’avant la crise, les conditions de financement étaient globalement favorables pour les PME et les entrepreneurs, qui bénéficiaient de faibles taux d’intérêt, de critères accommodants d’octroi des crédits et d’une offre de plus en plus diversifiée d’instruments de financement. Mais la crise du COVID‑19 a profondément bouleversé l’accès des PME au financement. Plus particulièrement, l’effondrement brutal du chiffre d’affaires des entreprises a provoqué de graves pénuries de liquidités qui ont mis en danger la survie de bon nombre d’entreprises viables. Ce rapport fait état d’une augmentation de la demande de prêts bancaires au cours du premier semestre de 2020, et d’une stabilité de l’offre de crédit grâce à l’action des pouvoirs publics. Parallèlement, on a observé un recul d’autres sources de financement, en particulier l’apport de fonds propres au stade du démarrage. Le rapport réunit des données sur le périmètre et l’ampleur des mesures prises par les gouvernements dans le monde, et en précise les principales caractéristiques. Il décrit les principaux enjeux stratégiques du financement des PME qui se poseront au cours des prochaines phases de la pandémie ; il s’agira en effet d’éviter le surendettement des PME, de promouvoir une gamme diversifiée d’instruments de financement, de stimuler la création d’entreprises et de renforcer la résilience des PME par des mesures structurelles.