Spain | A long-term social welfare strategy

Summary

The Spain 2050 strategy establishes a broad and useful set of objectives on which social consensus and state pacts can be built, as well as measures to achieve them.

Key points

• Key points:
• When a country is at the global frontier of economic and social progress, it has to imagine its future. If, as is the case with Spain, its social welfare still falls short of that of other EU societies with which it shares a political, economic and social agenda, then emulating the economic and social achievements of these countries is an ambitious and more realistic aspiration.
• Spain's convergence with some of Europe's most advanced economies all but ground to a halt four decades ago, both in regard to per capita income and to aggregate welfare indicators, which also include inequality, working hours, life expectancy, and environmental sustainability.
• There are many reasons for this lack of convergence but, as with the unemployment rate, per capita income and welfare gaps are widened by recessions and narrowed by growth, meaning that the reasons can be defined as structural or long-term. The differences that exist are long-standing, but they haven't just happened by chance.
• The Spain of 2021 is the result of the mistakes and successes of the last forty years, just as our situation in the coming decades will depend on the decisions we make now.

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