Why Spain's economy is booming

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“A decade after the country was written off as a basket case,” said The Times, Spain is enjoying “a new age of prosperity”.

It’s been named by The Economist as the world’s best-performing rich economy. Spain’s GDP expanded by 3.5% in the last quarter of 2024, “outstripping official forecasts and far outperforming its eurozone peers”, said Reuters.

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What is driving Spain’s growth?

Unlike his fellow leaders in France, Germany, Italy and Britain, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has extolled the virtues of a liberal immigration policy, telling his country’s parliament in October that the choice was “between being an open and prosperous country or a closed-off, poor country”. As Spain has one of the lowest birth rates in the EU, only immigration could grow the economy and sustain the welfare state, he said – and so it has proved.

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