The IEBF analyses the economic outlook for 2025 in a new Banking Lab session

Last Wednesday, 18 December, the IEBF (Spanish Banking and Finance Institute) brought together leading experts to analyse the “Economic Outlook for 2025”. Participants agreed that the context of strong economic growth in both 2024 and 2025 poses a good opportunity to address the structural challenges of the Spanish economy.

• The dynamism of the Spanish economy in 2024 positively surprised analysts. Growth will remain robust and will stand at 0.6% or 0.7% in the fourth quarter, despite the losses caused by the DANA. By 2025, they expect a slight slowdown in growth, possibly to 2.5%.
• The Banco de España is concerned about the limited carry-over effect of NextGenerationEU funds on productive private investment. It is crucial to ensure sustainable economic growth, and investment is the channel with the strongest multiplier effect.
• Looking ahead, the European project needs to be reinforced on multiple fronts, in regard to defence and simplified and improved regulations.
• The good outlook provides Spain with an opportunity to correct public deficit without derailing economic growth.
• We must anticipate some bottlenecks, such as the housing situation in Spain. The quantitative growth model depends on the incorporation of workers, particularly foreign, to the labour force.
• At the European level, we must also complete the banking union and the capital markets union, and create large structural tax capacity in Europe.

Ángel Gavilán

, Director General of Economics at Banco de España, Alicia Coronil, Chief Economist at Singular Bank, and Raymond Torres, Director of Economic Affairs at FUNCAS, participated in the conference, which was chaired by Manuel Balmaseda, Director of the IEBF.