Spain has been confronted with weak wage and productivity growth for several decades. This report provides an overview of the role that labour market policies as well as other policies can play in reviving broadly shared productivity growth in Spain. To set the scene, it starts with documenting the decline in broadly shared productivity growth and its underlying mechanisms.

This report provides a detailed assessment of job retention support (ERTE) in Spain during the COVID-19 crisis. It provides three major insights. First, job retention support in Spain has been transformed from a little used and difficult to access scheme before the COVID-19 crisis to a scheme that can be scaled up quickly in response to a major economic downturn and be phased out easily as economic conditions recover. Second, the use of ERTE was stronger in regions, industries and occupations most affected by the COVID-19 crisis, suggesting support was effectively targeted to firms and workers that needed it most. Third, job retention was highly effective in supporting employment during the COVID-19 crisis. It not only prevented a major surge in unemployment but also avoided that the labour market became congested with too many job seekers competing for too few job vacancies. The labour market reform of December 2021 consolidated many of the important changes that made job retention support so successful during the COVID-19 crisis and in addition introduced a specific mechanism that allows scaling up support in the case of large adverse shocks.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

The Spanish economy has been resilient to successive shocks, whose effects were mitigated by unprecedented policy support that is now being phased out. The labor market performance has been exceptionally strong, and some of its perennial deficiencies—most notably the large share of temporary workers and high unemployment—have eased. Growth is projected to reach 2.4 percent in 2024, and headline and core inflation are expected to converge close to the ECB’s target before mid-2025. Risks have become more balanced but are still tilted to the downside for growth and the upside for inflation, including predominantly domestic risks (political fragmentation, under-execution of NGEU spending) but also global risks (energy price volatility, geopolitical risks, geo-economic fragmentation).

The labour markets of OECD and emerging economies are undergoing major transformations. The widespread slow-down in productivity and wage growth and high levels of income inequality in many countries are coupled with structural changes linked to the digital revolution, globalisation and ...

An agenda for economic growth and equity In recent decades global economic productivity has slowed, while income inequality within nations has increased. The global economic pie has been growing more slowly—and more unequally—feeding the social discontent that is so evident in much of the world today. The contributors to this volume argue that the paradox of slowing productivity growth despite booming new technologies is real, not illusory. Most discussions of these trends in productivity growth and income distribution treat them as separate problems, with independent solutions. This book by economic experts with long experience in studying the global economy and development argues that lagging productivity and growing inequality are, in fact, linked by common causes and must have common solutions. Chief among those causes are the nature of today’s technological changes and the failures of markets and policymakers to keep up with those changes. In essence, the potential benefits of technological change, which coincided with the era of accelerated globalization, have not been harnessed to foster more robust, and more inclusive, economic growth. The authors maintain that reviving productivity growth and reducing inequality are not competing objectives for policy. Rather, they propose an integrated agenda emphasizing the synergistic nature of achieving long-term productivity growth and equity. The authors call for an agenda of "productive equity" that highlights the need for innovative policies, at both the national and international levels, that take advantage of the technological changes now reshaping markets and the world of work.

This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.