Spain's economy had its worst decline since the Civil War

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic , there was no strategy in the world that would save the economy. It mattered little if the governments of the day adopted strict restrictions or, on the contrary, avoided decreeing quarantines. Nobody avoided the economic crisis. The balance was ultimately counted in human lives.

Spain was no exception and this Friday the government based in Madrid reported that over the past year the local economy contracted by 11%, the biggest drop in 85 years.

According to the local newspaper El País, "it would be necessary to go back to the beginning of the Civil War to find a bigger hit. In euros, the drop in production amounts to around 130,000 million, almost the equivalent of what pensions cost in a year. So far this has been the economic bill for the coronavirus, a toll that according to organizations such as the IMF or the Bank of Spain will take at least three years to recover.

In the series of the National Institute of Statistics that begins in 1970 "there is not even remotely anything like it. The largest annual drop recorded is in 2009, when the gross domestic product fell by 3.8%. According to the calculations of the economic historian Leandro Prados de la Escosura , in 1936 the economy sank by 26.8% due to the Civil War. In 1868, the collapse was 13.3% due to the bursting of a railway investment bubble and poor harvests. In 1896, the activity collapsed 10% in full escalation of the War in Cuba. In 1945, World War II and the Autarchy inflicted a blow to GDP of 8.1%. The crisis of 29 caused a loss of 4.9% in Spain in 1930. And the Great Depression of 1873 caused a contraction of 8.9%."In the last 170 years only in the Civil War and in 1868 there have been higher falls, Prados de la Escosura pointed out to that medium.

To give an idea of ​​the magnitude of the coup , in the six years of financial crisis, between 2008 and 2013, 9.1 percentage points of GDP disappeared. In the 1993 recession after the Olympics and Expo, 1.1%.

Among all the OECD countries, Spain was, together with the United Kingdom, the one that suffered the most from the economic consequences of the pandemic. The reasons are clear: a longer and harsher confinement in the first wave. A productive fabric highly dependent on services such as hotels or tourism, which require more social interaction. The greater abundance of SMEs, which endure the ups and downs worse. And the high proportion of temporary jobs, whose contracts are more easily terminated when there is turbulence.