Ukraine will need about 40,000 million euros this year to cover its financial needs and to be able to pay for the basic functions of the State. A very high figure for a bankrupt country because it currently does not produce anything.
But it is only the tip of the iceberg. It is necessary to begin to develop a Marshall Plan to rebuild a literally destroyed country. And all this will have to be paid equally between the United States and the European Union.
This effort regardless of weapons and the aid that has been provided to them is beginning to erode public opinion that is increasingly calling more forcefully for the two parties to sit down to negotiate peace.
However, the true economic price of the war is the energy and raw materials crisis that it has caused. And, above all, the end of globalization. The cold war will continue for many years, even if there is an armistice, weakening world trade and restoring the old iron curtain that implies a general impoverishment of the world, especially in the less developed countries of the planet.
If we focus on the victims that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has produced in these nine months, we find 200,000 soldiers, half Ukrainian and half Russian, to which we must add more than 40,000 civilians. An excessively high price. Perhaps this is the reason why the United States has begun to pressure the Kyiv authorities to reach an agreement, and China is doing the same with Moscow.
What is absolutely clear, and in this there is full agreement, is that peace is a necessary condition, although not sufficient to end the recession in the world and recover the cycle of growth. In other words, a light of hope is beginning to be seen at the end of the tunnel.
What diplomacy has not achieved seems to be achieved by economics.
It is in this context that the autumn forecasts of the European Commission must be framed, which anticipate that the euro area will enter recession in this last quarter and the first of 2023. Germany, the European locomotive, is already in stagflation.
The Vice President of the Government, Nadia Calviño, has also received a vase of cold water. The Spanish economy will grow half of what has been calculated in the budgets, just one point (1%) of GDP.
The Sánchez government has made a virtue of necessity, arguing that we are the fastest growing country in the EU. This is a fallacy, since this growth is not due to the fact that productivity has increased or that our economy is doing better.
We are simply further behind in recovering from the crisis caused by the pandemic and the growth is due to the inertia produced after the great confinement. This is what explains why this year we end up with a GDP increase of 4.5%.
But, in addition, Spain is one of the few countries in the EU that has not yet recovered everything it lost during the last covid crisis and probably will not do so for a couple of years.
It must not be forgotten that Spanish workers have not recovered the purchasing power of their wages, nor has their productivity increased, in the last two decades. That is, every day we are a little poorer. A peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine would also benefit us economically.
