THE SPANISH MODEL
Lunes, junio 13th, 2011Prior to the debacle of 2008, Spain’s economy had been an object of particular admiration for Western commentators. [1] To reproduce the colourful metaphors of the financial press, in the 1990s and early 2000s the Spanish bull performed much better than the moping lions of ‘Old Europe’. In the decade following 1995, 7 million jobs were created and the economy grew at a rate of nearly 4 per cent; between 1995 and 2007, the nominal wealth of households increased threefold. Spain’s historic specialization in sectors such as tourism and property development seemed perfectly suited to the age of globalization, which in turn seemed to smile on the country. Construction boomed as house prices soared, rising by 220 per cent between 1997 and 2007, while the housing stock expanded by 30 per cent, or 7 million units. All feeling of being merely the biggest country of the continent’s periphery was dispelled by a new image of modernity, which did not just catch up with but in some ways surpassed standard European expectations—at least when Spain’s dynamism was compared to the ‘rigidities’ of the Eurozone’s core. Add to this the 2004 return to power of the Socialist Party, under a youthful José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the effect of such quintessentially ‘modernizing’ laws as those on same-sex marriage, and the mixture acquired the bouquet of a young red wine: extremely robust on the palate.
