The CPI continues to grow and leaves behind salaries and pensions. This 2022 a pension reform was carried out that can do little in the face of Spanish inflation, which stands this month of March at 9.8% compared to the previous year. The Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, explained this week that the Government’s commitment to pensioners is “forceful” and asked them “tranquillity”.
The minister assured thatPensions will be revalued in 2023 even if inflation reaches double digitsalthough, as he pointed out in La Sexta, the CPI is expected to stabilize during the second half of the year. In any case, pensions will be revalued based on the interannual CPI for November, the month in which the cost of the measure will be quantified in the 2023 General State Budgets.
According to estimates by the Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (FEDEA), with an average inflation rate of 6% the Government would have to withdraw from the coffers about 188,500 million euros if you want to revalue pensions, a figure that represents 14% of GDP. Another study prepared by the Funcas analysis center quantifies the cost of equating pensions to an average inflation of 7% at 10,000 million euros.
Spain is one of the countries that have registered a higher interannual CPI in March. According to data from datamacro.expansion.comSpain, with 9.8%, is ahead of Germany (7.3%), United Kingdom (7%), France (4.5%), Italy (6.7%) and Portugal (5.3%). On a global level, Spain has higher inflation in March than USA (8.5%), Canada (5.7%), China (1.5%) and even Russia (8.4%).
GDP will grow less than inflation, according to initial estimates
The prospects for the Spanish economy, for which growth of around 6% was expected This year, thanks to the push of European funds, they have moderated significantly -up to around 4%- after prices skyrocketed due to the rise in energy prices derived from the war in Ukraine. The public and private entities that have published the first reviews that include the impact of the war agree that inflation could reach an average of around 7% this year,
A GDP growth of between 4 and 4.5% would in any case represent an outstanding advance, but it would remain below the 5.1% registered in 2021 and far from the 7% that the Government calculated initially for 2022 and which will shortly be revised downwards when it sends the update on the stability program to Brussels. Waiting for the Executive to prepare its new macroeconomic forecasts before April 30, the Bank of Spain has already published its own, with a growth of 4.5% and average inflation of 7.5%with CPI rates of between 9 and 10% until the summer.
The Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) has lowered the GDP growth to 4.3%, but estimates that average inflation will remain at 6.2%. Funcas calculates that ehe economic growth will be 4.2% and forecasts an average CPI of 6.8%, although he considers that inflation would have peaked in March and that it will begin to fall in April to close December at 4.4%. Slightly more pessimistic is BBVA Research, which forecasts that the growth of the GDP stays at 4.1% and average inflation reaches 7%.