“We will have more measures in the coming months”

Just a few days before the vote on the spending ceiling is held in Congress, something key for the general budget for 2025, Carlos Cuerpo, Minister of Economy, has been live on ‘La mirada crítica’.

“We are continuing to work to be able to reach an agreement within the framework of the general budget for 2025,” he said at the beginning of the interview when asked about Junts’ lack of support.

The government explained the line that the government will follow in the economy: “We continue to bet on reaching an agreement. What we are seeing is that budgetary engineering is taking place and that is passing budgets from ministries that have surpluses to those that need them to meet our needs. This will be seen very clearly when the draft general state budget is presented, since the commitments will be seen and where these budget items will come from.

Asked whether not having a budget complicates Europe’s fiscal path, he clarified: “We have already set out a fiscal path with an ambitious objective, which was to end this year with a 3% deficit, lower it to 2.5% the following year and so on until reaching 1.8% in 2027, and I believe that this path will be the one that meets the fiscal requirements that we have received from Europe.”

Regarding economic forecasts, he said: “What we have seen in recent months are continuous upward adjustments to the forecasts for the Spanish economy by all experts and we are going to follow them. For 2024, I can tell you that we will raise our economic forecasts from 2.4 to 2.7 growth.”

The Minister of Economy has expressed a positive attitude towards an improvement in domestic economies: “We are aware that there are many households that continue to feel the rise in prices, the impact of interest rates on mortgages or rent, but we continue to work to improve household incomes with measures such as raising the minimum wage. Households are regaining purchasing power and we are finding solutions to price increases.

In response to the data provided by the Bank of Spain, according to which 600,000 homes are needed in Spain, while only 90,000 are being built, he said: “We are coming from a context of under-investment in housing construction and this is increased by the fact that households are growing, creating upward pressure on the need for housing. We are working on measures such as reducing the time it takes to obtain building permits, increasing new construction through subsidies or promoting the rental of housing, especially for young people, and we will have more measures in the coming months.”

On whether pensions are sustainable, he said: “The element of ageing or pension provision is already included and the reduction in the deficit makes us have that long-term vision that makes pensions sustainable. It is one of the major measures that makes our pensions sustainable for the next decades. Before it was a framework that was limited to the short term, but now it is long-term and anticipates the need for adjustment that will prevent us from suffering in the coming decades.”

On whether there will be a tax increase, he tried to explain: “When we look at how to achieve this deficit evolution, the first step is to update our situation. We had very good news last week, as we have grown well, and this effort can be reduced if we grow more and it translates into an evolution of spending in line with our growth.”