Spain

01Structure

Spain is a services economy with an unusually large exporting service at its centre: tourism, which earns foreign currency at a scale most economies can only earn through manufacturing.¹ Industry accounts for a little over a tenth of value added — close to the French share and well below Germany's — with automotive assembly, food processing and chemicals the largest branches.

The economy's other structural feature is its construction and property cycle, which drove the expansion before 2008 and the depth of the collapse after it. The composition that emerged from that decade is more diversified and less credit-dependent, but it retains a heavy weight in sectors — hospitality, construction, retail — whose employment swings with the cycle.

02Trade and exposure

Exports amount to a little over a third of output, and the service half of them carries the external account: tourism and, increasingly, business services have turned what was a persistent current-account deficit before 2008 into a surplus in most recent years. Goods exports are dominated by vehicles and food, with the euro area — France, Germany, Portugal, Italy — the main market.

The exposure that follows is less to tariffs than to travel. A shock that raises the cost of long-distance flights or depresses European household incomes reaches Spain through its largest export directly.²

03Energy and resources

Spain imports close to seven tenths of the energy it uses, and has almost no domestic fossil production. What sets it apart from Italy, with a similar import ratio, is its electricity: wind and solar have been built at a scale that makes Spain one of the leading deployers of both in the world, and a large renewable share of power generation limits how far a rise in gas prices passes through to electricity.²

The same capacity has made Spain one of Europe's cheaper places to buy electricity in sunny and windy hours, and is increasingly cited as a reason to locate energy-intensive activity there. The limitation is interconnection: the Iberian grid is only thinly linked to France, so surplus power cannot easily be sold north.

04Labour and demography

Spanish unemployment has been among the highest in the European Union for most of the past four decades, and its ten-year average sits far above the figure in the panel above. Youth unemployment runs above twenty per cent. The employment rate among 20- to 64-year-olds is around seventy-two per cent, one of the lower rates in the currency area.

The long-standing structural feature was dualism: a large share of workers on temporary contracts, hired and shed with the cycle, alongside a protected permanent core. The 2021 labour reform restricted temporary contracts to cases with a valid justification and pushed hiring towards permanent contracts, including intermittent permanent contracts for seasonal work.³ How much of the subsequent fall in unemployment is structural rather than cyclical is the question every forecast of the Spanish labour market turns on.

05Public finances

Public debt rose above a hundred per cent of GDP during the pandemic and has been declining since as a share of output, carried more by nominal growth than by surpluses.² The deficit has come back within reach of the treaty reference value, and Spain is among the largest recipients of the European recovery fund, whose grants and loans finance a substantial part of public investment.

The longer-run pressure is the pension system, whose indexation to prices was restored in 2021 and whose cost rises with the retirement of the large cohorts born in the 1960s and 1970s.

06Money and prices

Spain has set no policy rate of its own since 1999; the rate shown above is the European Central Bank's. As the currency area's fourth-largest economy it has more weight in that decision than most members, but its cycle has often diverged from Germany's — running faster in the years before 2008 and after 2023 — so the common rate has more than once been too loose or too tight for Spanish conditions.

The transmission runs more directly than in most members, because a large share of Spanish mortgages carry variable rates. A change in the ECB's stance reaches Spanish household budgets faster than it reaches German ones.

07What the models expect

These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.

Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.66 on consumer price inflation, 2.96 on real gdp, 0.29 on unemployment rate, 0.60 on central bank policy rate, 6.73 on government debt.

08Structural indicators

The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.

09Sources and method

Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-11, next review September 2027.

1. Tourism as a foreign-currency earner and the structure of growth — IMF, 2026 Article IV concluding statement
2. Tourism exposure, the renewable share of electricity and the debt path — European Commission, forecast for Spain; OECD Economic Outlook 2026/1, Spain
3. The labour reform restricting temporary contracts — OECD Economic Surveys: Spain 2025