The deindustrialization of the Catalan economy is a common process that has occurred throughout Spain, Europe and the United States. But it is surprising to see how in 1955 43% of everything that was produced in Catalonia (GDP) came from the manufacturing industry and now (with data from 2021) it is only 17%. They are almost two thirds less. With employment, the trend is more pronounced. Almost 70 years ago, 35 out of 100 workers were employed in factories, and today there are only 11 out of 100. The data is taken from the series published this week by Ángel de la Fuente, from Fedea, and Pep Ruiz, from BBVA Research . The report analyzes only the manufacturing industry. The industrial sector covers a somewhat broader area.
The director of the research service of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, Joan Ramon Rovira, places what is happening in Catalonia within "a general trend" throughout the world. In Spain as a whole –as can be seen in the graph– the evolution has not been so marked. In 1955, the manufacturing industry weighed 26% in GDP and today it accounts for 11%. The biggest fall in Catalonia can also be explained because they started from a higher level.
But the autonomous community that has endured the best is the Basque Country. Today 22% of its GDP comes from the manufacturing industry compared to 46% almost 70 years ago. Rovira explains it by pointing out that the Basque Country has not experienced the tourism boom that has occurred in communities such as Catalonia. The heading "commerce, hospitality, tourism and communications" has increased its weight in the GDP of the Basque Country from 14.3% to 22.1%. On the other hand, in Catalonia the increase in this period has been much higher: it has gone from 16.8% to 26.8% of GDP. It's 10 more points. The tourist revolution that has taken place in Catalonia, Valencia or the Balearic Islands represents a singularity within the whole of Spain.
Another way of analyzing the evolution of the manufacturing industry by community is to see how the relative weight has changed over the years. In 1955, 31% of all Spanish manufacturing industry originated in Catalonia and now it is 25.5%, so it has remained relatively stable. Rovira explains that in the first years that the series is analyzed, Catalonia's weight in GDP gradually fell to the lows of the eighties, when the community underwent the great industrial conversion. In fact, the years 1982 and 1983 are the only two years in which Catalonia is the community with the most unemployed. It surpassed Andalusia, the territory that during the last decades has led the ranking of unemployment. Starting in the mid-eighties, with the entry into the European Union, the Catalan industry once again gained weight until the 2008 crisis, when it fell again.
Sources from the Department of Business of the Generalitat, headed by Roger Torrent, point out that "this decrease in industrial weight since the 20th century has occurred in most Western economies, affects the entire euro zone and is caused by several causes: the outsourcing and diversification of the economy, the relocations produced and the outsourcing of accessory services”.
Joan Ramon Rovira points out that, in the case of the Basque Country, the great industrial crisis is the one that occurred between the eighties and the 2000s. Now the distances remain between the two territories (Basque Country and Catalonia), as can be seen in the graph . According to the Department of Business, "it should be noted that Catalonia, as the industrial engine of the State as a whole, has also improved its weight in the State as a whole since the financial crisis of 2008. In this sense, we have gone from 21.9% in 2009 to 25.2% in 2020”.
A few weeks ago, Fedea also updated the data on the evolution of the economy, employment and wages by region. In this case, he was surprised that both in 1955 and today the community with the lowest salaries (Extremadura) and the one with the highest (Madrid) were the same. Andalusian Economic Analysts defended that one of the reasons for this invariability is the great weight in Extremadura of agriculture, a sector with lower salaries. The data published now reveal that while in 1955 agriculture represented 47.8% of Extremadura's GDP, today it only contributes 7.1%. The decrease is spectacular, but the weight of the sector in that community continues to be much higher than that of agriculture in Spain as a whole: 2.9%. In 1955 it was 20.5%.
