The deindustrialization of the Catalan economy is a common process that has taken place throughout Spain, Europe and the United States. But it is surprising to note that in 1955 43% of everything 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 every 100 workers were factory employees, and today it is only 11 out of 100. The data is taken from the series published last week by Ángel de la Fuente, de Fedea, and Pep Ruiz, from BBVA Research. The report only analyzes the manufacturing industry. The industrial sector covers a slightly wider area.
The director of the studies service of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, Joan Ramon Rovira, places what is happening in Catalonia within "a generalized trend" around the world. In Spain as a whole - as can be seen in the graph - the evolution has not been so marked. In 1955, manufacturing accounted for 26% of GDP, and today it accounts for 11%. The sharpest fall in Catalonia can also be explained by the fact that it 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 seventy years ago. Rovira explains this by pointing out that the Basque Country has not experienced the boom in tourism that there has been in communities such as Catalonia. The heading "trade, hospitality, tourism and communications" has increased its weight in the Basque Country's GDP 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. That's 10 more points. The tourism revolution that has taken place in Catalonia, Valencia or the Balearic Islands is unique within Spain as a whole.
Another way to analyze 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 originated in Catalonia, and now it is 25.5%, so it has remained relatively stable. Rovira explains that in the first years analyzed in the series, Catalonia's weight in the GDP kept falling to the lows of the 1980s, when the community suffered 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 people. It surpassed Andalusia, the territory that has led the unemployment ranking in recent decades. From the mid-1980s, with the entry into the European Union, the Catalan industry gained weight again until the crisis of 2008, when it was reduced again.
Sources from the Department of Business of the Generalitat, led by Roger Torrent, point out that "the decline in industrial weight since the 20th century has occurred in most Western economies, affects the whole of the Eurozone and is caused by several causes: the tertiaryization and diversification of the economy, the relocations produced, and the outsourcing of ancillary services".
Joan Ramon Rovira points out that, in the case of the Basque Country, the great industrial crisis is the one between the eighties and the 2000s. Now the distances are maintained between the two territories (Basque Country and Catalonia), as appreciate in the graph. According to the Department of Enterprise, "it should be noted that Catalonia, as the industrial engine of the State as a whole, has also improved its weight within the State as a whole since the financial crisis of 2008. In this sense, we have 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, it was surprising that both in 1955 and today the community with the lowest salaries (Extremadura) and the one with the highest (Madrid) were the same. Analistas Económicos de Andalucía defended that one of the reasons for the invariance is the great weight in Extremadura of agriculture, a sector with lower salaries. Published data reveal that while in 1955 agriculture represented 47.8% of Extremadura's GDP, today it only contributes 7.1%. The decline is spectacular, but the weight of the sector in the community is still much higher than that of agriculture in Spain as a whole: 2.9%. In 1955 it was 20.5%.
